As the coronavirus spreads throughout the world, businesses are being faced with setting up policies and procedures to enable everyone to work from home (WFH). Doing this presents several challenges, some of them brought on by new demands on your IT department and some by demands of a new way of working that you may not have anticipated. A good reference point for the complexities involved is this Twitter thread about what Slack did to move to 100% WFH model. In this podcast, Paul and David draw upon their own decades-long experience as sole business owners. Among our advice:

1. Think about printing, email and sharing files and the IT services that will be needed to support that activity. Be careful about SaaS services such as Dropbox; if users aren’t trained property they could expose your corporate data unintentionally. 


2. Make sure your infosec is up to par. A VPN isn’t just the only thing you need to worry about it. Is your home router secured with an appropriate password? Do you encrypt your network traffic across the Internet? Has your laptop been screened for malware? These and other questions need to be addressed before rolling out any work-from-home solution.


3. Does your staff have the right tools? Just because everyone has a laptop doesn’t mean anything, particularly they’re used to having multiple monitors and great audio/video gear. You may have to purchase additional accessories to make your staff productive. 


4. Make sure your staff has a separate workspace that is isolated from the rest of the house. You want to minimize distractions and unplanned family “visits” during the workday.


5. Get a good mic (David uses the Blue Snowball, Paul uses a Logitech wireless). You should be able to get something decent for $50-$100. 


6. Standardize on a video conferencing supplier (we both like Zoom at the moment, although there are privacy issues that you might want to consider) and make sure all your gear provides solid audio quality when you use it.


7. Make sure your home bandwidth is sufficient. Pay attention to upload speeds, because these can impact your latency and video quality.


8. Learn new video conferencing etiquette, review our previous podcast on some of our tips here.


9. Set up a shared scheduling tool for everyone to use and standardize on a corporate instant messaging tool, too. 

The post FIR B2B #135: Tips for Transitioning to a Home-Based Workforce appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.