With many businesses and organisations facing the need to support remote employees, some are looking for help familiarising themselves with the tools available to them and best practices for enabling a distributed workforce. Here's a practical guide from the Geeks on Tap team.
Give Your Workforce Access to the Tools They Need to Collaborate Remotely
Video conferencing, chat, email, and shared documents are all essential tools for helping a remote workforce stay connected and productive. For example, Hangouts Meet helps people stay connected while remote — to help businesses and schools stay connected, Google recently announced advanced Meet features available to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers at no additional cost.
It's also important to ensure managed devices have the right policies applied so employees can work securely from home. Review your device management settings and confirm access controls are appropriate for a remote environment. You can find guidance on this here.
Be Prepared to Provide Support and Information at Scale
Internal sites can be powerful tools for sharing critical information at scale within your organisation. When shifting to remote work, consider building an internal resource hub that includes:
- Product tutorials
- Best practices for working remotely, including tips on how to use shared drives and collaborate on documents in real time
- A support chat room and scheduled office hours where IT can help with questions live
Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are also important tools for keeping workers up to date. Make use of the variety of sharing options in Google Workspace to control who can view, comment, or edit.
Ensure Corporate Policies Reflect Workforce Needs
Think about your environment with current circumstances in mind. For example, the ability to provide remote support via Chrome Remote Desktop is valuable when IT staff can't be physically present. And the ability to manage Chrome devices remotely means you can push policies and apps without touching the hardware.
If you have context-aware access policies applied to different user groups — such as only letting certain employees access sensitive data from managed devices — review whether these need adjustment for employees now working from home networks. Also consider reviewing your organisation's policies around distributing hardware to employees who may not have a suitable home setup.
For Chrome device deployment guidance, review these pointers from Google.
Be Ready to Monitor Adoption and Share Employee Successes
Don't set it and forget it. Be prepared to understand how usage patterns differ from team to team or even by region. Analysing trends in usage helps you identify where employees may need more support, and the Meet Quality Tool can help you identify and resolve video conferencing issues proactively.
Find, celebrate, and share wins. Create an avenue — a chat room or co-authored document — for employees to share their remote working tips and experiences. These peer insights are often the most practical and compelling.
Looking Ahead
We hope this guide has helped you think through your organisation's needs as you plan to support a distributed workforce. For more guidance, see the Learning Center article on tips for working remotely, visit the Help Center, or download the quick deployment guide for enabling remote working with Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.
Related Topics
G Suite Productivity & Collaboration Remote Work COVID-19
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