IT’s 5-Point Action Plan for Supporting Remote Workers During the Coronavirus Pandemic & Beyond

COVID-19 has forced an unprecedented leap to remote working that has caught many companies unprepared. In fact, before the pandemic hit, 52% of employees said their company lacked the technology to support remote work, and 44% of companies didn’t support it at all, requiring employees to work from an office.

In the current crisis, employees are desperately seeking some sense of normalcy during very uncertain times. By helping them to remain productive while working from home, CIOs have an opportunity to provide a sense of stability and purpose, while also helping the company to weather the storm.

But many face technical challenges that make working from home extremely stressful, if not impossible—namely endpoints that weren’t setup for this new arrangement. In a remote-first world, endpoint management is critical. But the overnight shift to remote working has pushed IT to the brink in their efforts to give employees the same endpoint experience they’d have in the office at home. IT staff is working longer hours, stressed out and fielding the brunt of employees’ frustrations. The service desk is being crippled by a surge in tickets and the lack of compliance and governance of remote endpoints raises security risks.

To maintain business continuity, CIOs need a strong plan if they are to support effective remote working at scale. Here’s where to start:

Ensure endpoint readiness. To ensure employees can actually work remotely, IT needs visibility of and direct access to every device, regardless of where it sits, to identify and resolve issues. Teams can measure endpoint readiness by running synthetic transactions on each device to assess performance and responsiveness and flag any issues. Then, enable remote access to each endpoint directly in your ITSM workflow tool, such as the ServiceNow console, so that IT can immediately resolve technical hurdles.

1. Empower the service desk to provide real-time support. IT is seeing a huge spike in service desk load, so CIOs must increase their speed of response. To help IT work more efficiently to serve employees’ needs, give level one technicians access to the right tools, data and programmatic knowledge sharing to identify and remediate issues quickly and set policies to automate fixes across the entire endpoint estate. This can alleviate bottlenecks (and frustrations), improve first-call resolution and average time to remediation, reduce escalations and get employees back to work faster.
2. Provide self-service options. Employees may be working unusual hours to balance work and family obligations, while also likely experiencing more technical issues as they transition to working from home. Giving them resources and autonomy to manage their own devices and software can help them feel more empowered, especially if something goes wrong and they’re unable to get in touch with IT immediately. Providing self-service solutions, like a chatbot with built-in task automation or a self-serve app portal, enables employees to resolve common issues, download approved apps and maintain productivity.
3. Tackle security issues. When devices move outside the firewall, protecting them becomes infinitely more complicated. Cybercriminals are already preying on distracted employees with coronavirus-themed malware that leverage known vulnerabilities. This makes rapid patching essential. To protect the organization, IT must have remote access to deploy OS and software patches and ensure device compliance on every endpoint, even if it’s offline. This also allows IT to respond quickly if a device is stolen or lost to remove all data remotely and maintain security.
4. Plan for the long haul. No one can predict how long we’ll be working remotely, but all indications are that it could be a long haul. That means CIOs must implement IT tools that allow IT to maintain healthy, stable performance across remote endpoints and limit employee disruption. To do so, take advantage of your existing investment in a workflow automation tool by augmenting it with task automation capability so you can troubleshoot and resolve issues immediately, directly within the console, to increase first call resolution rates.

While you could do all these things manually with a bevy of solutions, it would be incredibly slow, cumbersome and bring productivity to a halt.

The 1E Tachyon platform can take remote-work IT woes off your list of worries so you can focus on what matters most: staying well and staying in business. The only real-time platform designed with remote endpoints in mind, Tachyon automates endpoint performance assessment, patching and updates, and enables real-time troubleshooting and remediation by giving IT the visibility and control needed to keep endpoints working at peak performance. It also integrates seamlessly into the ServiceNow ITSM console so

And, when the dust settles and we return to business as usual, the 1E Tachyon platform can help your IT team deliver the endpoint performance, flexibility and security your employees have come to expect wherever work takes them.

Sumir Karayi founded 1E, an endpoint management company, in 1997 with the goal to drive down the cost of IT for organizations of all sizes. Under Sumir’s leadership, 1E has become a successful global organization and has been inventing solutions to help IT get more done every day for 20 years. 1E is also a trusted partner, with 31 million licenses deployed across more than 1,700 organizations in 42 countries worldwide.