Monthly News International
Supporting Work From Home Employees – Best Practices
Several of our clients are looking for research on how companies support staff working from home effectively. One of the challenges they all face is the support center receives many varied calls from WFH users and resolution can take some time as it is not often easy to deduce the cause of the outage.
There is a growing trend where a lot of companies are promoting work at home employment as a way to incent employees and reduce costs. For example, according to The Telework Coalition , work from home employees can save a company around $20,000 a year.
So the big question becomes, what can be done to support this growing segment of the workforce? While some of the remedies are self-evident and not unlike the best practices that are followed when supporting in-house employees, there are some additional considerations.
Communication: Contact information must be clear, concise and easily accessed. While some companies have tried to address this problem by providing several different contacts depending on the nature of the problem, more times than not, the employee has no idea as to what the problem is. Experton Group recommends a central service center approach where the first call is fielded by (and sometimes resolved) through a Level 1 service center person.
Remote Access Tools: A critical aspect of supporting remote workers is to make it possible for support personnel to remotely access the employee’s workstations, laptops, etc. Therefore, a series of tools/applications/utilities will need to be pre-installed on the end-user devices.
Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): With the parallel developments in both the Cloud Computing market and the thin client device market, it has become possible to reduce the complexity of the end-user device. This shifts some of the support requirements from the client device to the server. This has many benefits.
Soft Phones: Voice communications can be easily accommodated via soft phones where the employee would only need to have a computer and Internet connection. This eliminates significant costs and provides a way for the employee to communicate that does not tie up their personal phone lines.
Employee Training: Employee training is a critical part of the support process. Employees need to be trained to recognize certain types of problems and need to understand that many of the issues that are called into the service center are caused by inadvertent keystrokes or inappropriate use of the device itself.
Self-Help Tools: Self-help tools need to be installed, especially one for lost/forgotten passwords, which can be 40-50 percent of the support requests.
Local Hands-On Support/Pro-active Management: Other companies realize that there are issues that can only be resolved on site. In those cases, a technical field work force is established to support the work from home employees. These technicians are provided with an inventory of client devices, and transportation.
Standard Work-From-Home infrastructure: One of the traditional approaches to reducing support effort and cost is to standardize the technology and supporting infrastructure. While this is becoming problematic in today’s world, it is still a valid approach. Experton Group suggests that a standardized work-from-home template be created. This configuration and device use is mandatory for work-from-home employees.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning: One other aspect of work-from-home that needs to be addressed is what are the contingencies in case of power outage, loss of Internet connectivity, etc. The company needs to have some guidelines to support BCP.
Data Loss Protection: Encryption and backup need to be addressed as well as deletion/retention criteria. In case the device is lost or fried, employees need to know what should have been saved where and what the potential data loss may have been. The RPO could be a variable by function or user selection.
Call Scripts: When a call comes into the service center, major companies such as GE and IBM that have many diverse products have difficulties in root cause identification. The objective is to resolve the call with one or fewer hand-offs since more hand-offs lead to user dissatisfaction.
The Bottom Line: While it is generally accepted that work-from-home programs can save companies significant amount of overhead, it is important to make sure that they can be supported in an efficient and cost-effective way.
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