When the UK government took the decision to impose working restrictions in March 2020, the nature of office work changed dramatically overnight.

Not all the changes had a negative impact, people who could work from home found that they could be just as productive without the commute to the office.

We look at the lessons learnt and how they can be implemented to make the new normal a better place to work.

Working from home

It’s been a revelation just how convenient working from home is, both for the employer and the employee. No travel time meaning more productive hours and less pollution from driving, and, if your job allows it, more flexible working hours giving you more quality time with your family, fewer distractions (in some cases) and no arguments over who used the your milk.

Going forward, it’s easy to see that employees could use this to their advantage, downsizing their office as it only has to accommodate a fraction of the workforce while the remainder work from home or ‘hot desk’ in shifts.

First, lets look at how working from home could be a long term change, and at what a work from home office might need.

Home Workstation & Hardware

It’s more than likely that your work from home employees will need a computer, chances are they already have a computer of some sort at home, but with the ubiquitousness of tablets and smartphones, it may well be that their home computer is somewhat outdated.

There are a number of options available here depending on the person and their position in the company.

The least expensive method would be to use a remote desktop session (even running it from a ‘live CD or USB rather than from their computers operating system) This requires little processing and memory power from the remote end as all the heavy work is done at the server end (typically cloud based or a server at your office)

You could provide a laptop for work use, giving you control over the spec and budget of the machines your staff are using, or you could give them a budget to buy their own devices for work use.

Unless particular processing power is needed on the remote devices, say for graphics work, then using a laptop is absolutely the best option. There’s a choice of touch screen, stylus input, tablet/laptop or standard laptops again depending on your employees needs.

Additional screens can be setup, especially if your staff are used to using them in the office, wide screens and rotatable screens are ideal for managing large spreadsheets or word processing.

Having a decent camera, microphone and speakers are also very useful especially when you’re running video conferencing calls or your remote workers are contacting clients. If the built in offerings are a bit low quality, it’s easy to buy and use external devices.

If the remote workers home space allows it, have a separate screen that can be dedicated to video calls and conferencing, leaving this logged into an office Microsoft Team meeting (or zoom, Skype or any other conferencing app) all day long so all your remote workers can see and speak to each other without having to start up a specific session. This helps give the office/team feeling to working and means that your staff can keep in contact as they would do normally, such as chitchat over a coffee in the office, or asking for help from colleges while their working.

If the remote workspace is not a dedicated area, such as a home office, then having hardware that can be setup and then packs away quickly and tidily is essential. If your remote workers are working on the dining room table, having two 20 inch monitors in place all the time would really get in the way!

Your remote workers might also need access to a printer or scanner. Depending on what quality they need and how often they need it, there are several options. From providing a multi-function printer/scanner at home for every day print jobs, to setting up the office printer to allow remote print access, and using the camera on the users smartphone as a scanner.

Home Broadband

In most cases, a lightning fast broadband connection at the remote end is not required, the amount of data sent to and from a remote worker can be kept quite light or buffered and cached when the broadband is less busy.

If there are other people sharing the broadband, hogging all the bandwidth when your remote user downloads a set of files is soon going to be picked up on, so using technology you can cache these files on the remote workstation over night, or access them via remote desktop software.

Carrying out a survey of your remote workers homes could help identify better broadband deals, and help your remote workers position their workstations and WiFi access points/routers in the best locations for connectivity and speed.

Compliance

It’s essential that your remote workers remain compliant with various legislation while working from home, Health and Safety and GDPR are the two that immediately spring to mind, but there may be others that you need to take into account.

GDPR, the Data Protection Ace 2018, policies you have in place will need assessing and updating to cover the new situation, but this should not be a barrier to moving to this new working environment.

If home PC’s, tablets, smartphones or other devices are being used to process personal information, they should be assessed and managed according to your GDPR policy.

Business information and household information should be strictly segregated, and management put in place to protect the business data.

Assessing the working conditions for your remote users will quickly identify areas that need to be covered under your GDPR policy, this may include things like; screen privacy, data storage, printing and destroying printed material, transporting data between the office and remote office and data encryption.

Meeting Room & Reception

With your office staff working from home, it means the office doesn’t need to be so big. In lots of situations, a meeting room, reception area and one or two offices would suffice.

This means the meeting room can be large enough to accommodate clients and observe the social distancing rules, and and office workers in the building could work from one of the offices meaning they are isolated from other people while they’re in.

Your reception could be fitted with a client-facing monitor, and any ‘walk in’ clients could still speak with any member of staff via video conferencing.

A networked scanner and printer could also be made available to share documents.

Hot desking would need a slight revamp, with maybe just a docking station and screen left behind when a users leaves, and a wipe down of all surfaces before they are used again.

Keeping it all together

Making sure your company data is available to your remote workers in a reliable and secure way is essential. There are a number of options for you to look at.

Firstly there are cloud only solutions, services like Microsoft and Google. They are the big boys but that is a benefit; their platforms are reliable and robust and have a range of options and prices that give you access to different amounts of storage space and different tools.

Then there are hybrid solutions, part cloud based and part office-server based. These setups allow you to make use of all the transport facilities of cloud based connectivity, but with the security and peace of mind of an office-based server.

Then there is the pure office-only solution, letting you manage and configure every aspect of the system with an in-house server.

Each option has it’s pros and cons and are suitable to different types of work, in some situations you might combine different elements of all three setups to offer the right connectivity and security for your remote workers.

Having control over your data is essential. Being able to audit it’s use, monitor for breaches in your security, and remotely destroy data from a compromised device are all tools you should have at your disposal.

Making sure your data is backed up is critical. Also, making sure the data on your backup targets is up-to-date and includes any data that might be sitting on a remote device should be built into your backup plans.