Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The goal of management is always to ensure productivity and the fulfillment of preset objectives. But having so many employees working remotely because of current global circumstances or corporate policies makes performance management challenging. Here we have keys to managing individual performance remotely. None of these keys involve cracking a whip for getting the level of performance you want.

One thing that 2020 has clearly shown us is that communications services is a basic and fundamental driver of our global economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized that many tasks can be done at home, if access to communications services is sufficient. Many of us can work from home or other locations outside of the traditional office; students do not have to be physically present at school to participate in lectures; and we don’t need to go to movie theaters watch a new film release.

Many businesses put temporary measures in place last year to support remote working. With the shift to remote working appearing more long-term, businesses are now starting to think more strategically about how their networks can support a virtual workforce. Here we look at five network considerations to support your virtual workforce…

The events of 2020 — from the pandemic to the resulting mass quarantines — have been one of the most impactful societal events of this century. Nearly overnight, it has relegated hundreds of millions of workers to their homes, likely through much of 2021 and perhaps beyond.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of remote selling techniques as organizations adapt to the work-from-home environment, such as the “new school” digital buying practices and “digital-first” sales trends. The transition from face-to-face to virtual selling is ongoing but has already increased the adoption of remote sales models. Many sales reps are also working from home which is a new challenge.

As we head towards COVID-19’s first anniversary, let’s take a moment to analyze how far we’ve all come. The first few months may appear catastrophic, with physical businesses and airports shutting down indefinitely. However, it taught many companies how to adapt to a new normal and learn to swim in deep waters, almost overnight. As businesses transitioned to the digital landscape, employees were advised to work remotely.

With more people working from home due to the COVID-19 crisis, businesses of all sizes need to know when their employees are working. You need an effective way to track working hours and know what your employees are doing while they are working. One effective way to do this without having to invest in an expensive online time tracking system for employees is by using server monitoring software and file monitoring software.

One of the lasting changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic is that it forced organizations to rethink the concept of a workspace. As remote work became inevitable, IT teams had to enable the secure transition to remote work almost overnight. Opening up offices, on the contrary, will likely be executed in planned phases. A United States Department of State advisory recommends that workforces return to an office in three phases, with the employees most at risk coming in at a later stage.

Teams around the world are going through changes. With offices closed from Hong Kong to San Francisco, Zoom meetings are the new norm, and online platforms are the standard for collaborating and keeping businesses running as usual. We’ve written about distributed work and how doing distributed well requires the right tools. When a traditional office environment isn’t available, information naturally becomes fractured across multiple single-purpose platforms.