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With almost every U.S. state is under a non-essential business shutdown, most developers and IT professionals have the luxury of working from home. But shifting to remote work is easier said than done. Here’s how you can stay productive, communicate effectively, and get the resources you need while working remotely.
Develop a work from home guide that you can share with your colleagues and other teams within the company.
A WFH guide ensures everyone follows company best practices, uses the right VPN to access the corporate network, and knows how to communicate with their managers and tech support.
It also gives employees tips on how to manage their time, stay productive, and create boundaries between their work hours and personal hours at home.
Your first version doesn’t have to be perfectly polished. Focus on communicating key information about:
Once everyone’s operational and signed into the daily video conference call, you can distribute updated versions of your guide.
Many employees may be new to remote working and not entirely familiar with cybersecurity best practices. Even your resourceful, tech-savvy employees can jeopardize the enterprise network by using workarounds that aren’t company approved. Finally, anyone from an experienced IT professional to a non-tech worker can fall victim to social engineering tricks like phishing.
Cybercriminals look at COVID-19 as a big opportunity to make money. In fact, the FBI expects a surge in Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes due to COVID-19.
Get ahead of this by refreshing your colleagues with clear communication about:
Does your team’s shared drive use a legacy filing system that no longer suits its purpose? This is the time to fix it. In fact, an organized shared drive becomes even more important when everyone’s working remotely.
You won’t be able to fix this overnight, but you can definitely get started by:
There’s some debate on just how much technical documentation a team should produce. For instance, agile teams like to keep documentation to a minimum.
But in a remote working environment, it’s incredibly important for employees to access clear information about different processes, products, and systems.
If your team works in operations, rather than development, this is even more critical. Since you’re responsible for supporting the entire infrastructure, you want to limit the amount of support tickets by helping employees help themselves.
Your team probably already uses tools like GitHub, Jira or Slack to get work done, but with your entire team working from home, you’ll likely need more WFH tools. That may mean new tools, additional VPN licenses, upgraded accounts, or both on everything from video conferencing platforms to DevOps tools to cloud storage space.
Make the ask. If you’re a manager, consider requesting a COVID-19 specific IT budget, so you can purchase what you need instead of seeking individual purchase approvals.
Above all, put your physical and mental health first. Staying focused and productive is difficult under the best of circumstances, let alone during a global pandemic. Follow the advice of public health officials, create clear boundaries between work and personal time, and take care of you.
For more advice to help you achieve your career goals – click here
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