How do I best support my remote workers?
Whether you’ve already released workers from their desks or are considering it for the future, we speak to the companies that help to make it happen
We ask the experts – and get surprising answers.
Anders Reeves is CEO of Conosco, a company that doesn’t just support remote workers – it lives and breathes the whole concept. “We had a star employee in our London headquarters who was originally from Zimbabwe,” he explained to PC Pro. “He wanted to return to South Africa with his wife so, rather than part company, the founders allowed him to spin off a similar operation there, and it turned out to be a brilliant operating model for the business.”
More than half of Conosco’s employees work remotely now, but Reeves claims they’re fully integrated and supported as part of the business.
“We created OurCafe,” Reeves said. “Every Wednesday, in both London and South Africa, we down tools, sit in our respective boardrooms and eat together. The webcams are open, and we’ve got this great banter and recognition, despite the fact that the teams are thousands of miles away. It’s like being in the pub or coffee shop for an hour a week, and if a client comes in we can introduce them to the whole company, even though half of them are half a world away.”
The secret of Conosco’s success, at least in part, is finding a process that works for the people who work for it. In doing so, it’s smashed the industry average for retention. London support firms typically retain staff for a couple of years. At Conosco, the average employee sticks around for eight.
Far from being niche, remote working is becoming the norm for an ever-greater proportion of employees, and even those who don’t work away from base now, may want to do so in the future. The question is how you, as a business, support them.
A business in the cloud
“In an ideal world you’d have the conversation about what’s best for your infrastructure before you even set things up,” said Chris Short of SBS IT, although he acknowledges that won’t always be possible – particularly not for an established company looking to make the switch. “Office 365 ticks a lot of boxes for us and satisfies the legislation surrounding GDPR for email, cloud storage and collaboration. That said, we wouldn’t encourage anyone to switch away from what they’re already using unless there were security or legislative issues ahead.”
The move to relying more on the cloud has simplified remote working and, said Short, is causing smaller companies to examine their existing support provision. “You’ve got to ask whether a company with 50 seats needs its own IT department – or the racks of servers that were once commonplace. Some of our clients do, but only the ones with very specific requirements, processing a lot of data and using a lot of space. Doing that in the cloud would be cost-prohibitive.”
Outsourcing to a firm such as SBS IT or Conosco, then, could take much of the pain out of a switch from
“You’ve got to ask whether a company with 50 seats needs an IT department – or the racks of servers that were once commonplace”
purely on-site working to an on-site and off-site mix.
While Short is happy to accommodate any hardware and software mix, he advocates limiting user privileges. Preferably, restrict admin access to the support contractor and a senior member of staff, because this will minimise the likelihood of home workers installing their own applications and, with them, vulnerabilities.
Supporting remote workers, remotely
How do you support workers when you’ll never be able to visit their desks? That’s where remote support tools come into their own, and NetSupport’s managing director, Al Kingsley, told us that NetSupport Manager is evolving to meet the growing demand for off-site working. “A lot of our evolution tends to be in response to our customers’ changing needs,” he told PC Pro.
A cornerstone of many IT departmental workflows for the past 30 years, NetSupport Manager has integrated new ways of connecting, growing from LAN-only to encompass first WAN, then the internet. With every change, it’s reconsidered the security implications of pushing updates, viewing screens and controlling client machines over longer distances and across less predictable topologies.
“A couple of releases back, we integrated the PIN-connect server,” Kingsley explained. “It’s another secure and quick connection option within NetSupport Manager that from a company perspective saves IT teams a lot of time and money by reducing travel time to any of the multiple sites that the company has – and its associated expenses. The work can be done remotely and on the go.”
Similarly, SBS IT uses ConnectWise to remotely monitor and manage its clients’ desktops. Like Conosco, highlights the potential cost savings of contracting out IT support at the same time as adopting remote working.
“We tend to price on a percomputer or per-user basis, with the latter covering the user for up to three devices,” Short said. “The latter is a little more expensive because we have to install agents on three machines, but it includes unlimited remote support during business hours, patch management, maintenance windows outside working hours and antivirus. If we need to attend site we make an additional charge at a reduced hourly rate, but most of our work can be done remotely.”
It’s a similar story at Conosco, which prides itself on adding just two cost lines to clients’ accounts, which remain within the client’s control.
“One is a support cost that scales as the business scales,” said Reeves. “The other is a pool of money that we’re allowed to draw down from every year from our client’s IT budget, which we can allocate to infrastructure projects, high-end security audits and consultancy or anything from our digital transformation capability. If the fund’s not enough, clients can dial it up but, equally, they can dial it right down.”
“Universal (almost) fast and stable broadband connections have made central office locations much less appealing”
The basics
Turn back the clock and remote working would be impossible for the vast majority of employees, but that’s no longer the case. Universal (almost) fast and stable broadband connections have made central office locations less appealing, and agile companies are saving costs while accommodating their staff’s changing expectations.
“The landscape has changed enormously over the last five years in terms of both stability and pricing,” said Short. “A small business that uses an office suite and email as its main tools can have staff working remotely with far less need for IT support.”
Rather than rolling out an Exchange server of their own, he recommends clients pay Microsoft’s per-seat fees for mailboxes and storage, and save themselves a lot of cost, alongside the hassle of maintaining their own infrastructure.
Remote working is successful when it’s built on trust, said Conosco’s Reeves. “I’ve seen senior managers empower their staff, so that when they’re not on site and they’re working remotely they’re trusted to get on with the job. A key part of building a strong business culture is trusting your employees.”
Trust can still be an issue in businesses where presenteeism holds fast, but things are changing. Staff are increasingly tech-literate, and used to the idea of working whenever and wherever they choose. The question, then, may not be how you could ever support a remote workforce, but why you aren’t doing it already.
Platforms such as Office 365 and Google Apps, along with remote management software and the support of outsourced IT providers, have changed the landscape faster than many boardrooms realise.