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Suddenly it ’ s clear the remote working arrangements many thought would be temporary are – and will remain – permanent features of the modern workplace .
how to enable their homebound workforce to truly work while at home .
A little less video conference , a little more action
When businesses were first forced to enable their staff to telecommute in March , there was a pervading sense that the changes would only be in effect for a few months .
As such , the technology investments many made were relatively shallow . Employees were given licenses for cloud-based video conferencing and collaboration platforms which , although they certainly helped keep people connected , did little to enable them to actually work from home . After all , how many
Zoom or Teams meetings can one have before any actual work gets done ? Empowering remote workers to actually work from home requires a more mature approach . For example , consider all the businesscritical applications employees need to access to do their jobs while they ’ re in the office .
There ’ s Enterprise Resource Planning ( ERP ), Customer Relationship Management ( CRM ), internal databases and intranets , not to mention business email accounts hosted on Exchange servers and industry-specific applications such as CAD design software .
Think about how much productivity you would lose on a normal day if access to all these critical applications suddenly disappeared . That ’ s exactly what ’ s happening every day employees work from home with only video conferencing , collaboration and other basic apps at their fingertips . In other words , there ’ s a lot more to remote working than simply talking about work .
Bringing the business home
These applications aren ’ t called ‘ business-critical ’ just because it sounds impressive . Collectively , they contain an enterprise ’ s crown jewels – whether
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