Remote Workforce Challenges

With Google announcing this week that it will keep its employees home till July of 2021 – essentially a year – a seismic change was set in motion. While other tech giants like Facebook and Twitter had already announced that they probably wouldn’t bring a sizable fraction of the work force back, this was the first to extend remote working to the *entire* workforce (all 200,000 of them) through the middle of next year. Other companies will no doubt follow the tech giants’ lead, which will add another transformative aspect to what is being referred to these days as the “New Normal”

This has widespread, significant, operational and logistical ramifications for organizations. Of the many hurdles, one of the biggest is that the employee is now physically disconnected from all forms of assistance. This means that the unofficial “tap the shoulder” or “water-cooler conversation” approach is no longer an option. While having inter-office chat options might mitigate this to some extent, service requests, and information query and retrieval, pose one of the biggest challenges. Often the only recourse an employee has is to open a ticket or call into a help desk.

The issues could be something as simple and mundane as a password reset, an inquiry about employee benefits, or setting a default browser, to slightly more complicated like removing an add-in from Outlook, fixing a corrupted Excel instance or a deciphering a cryptic application error message. In a lot of enterprises these form the bulk of the workload that support staff have to deal with. While some of these might seem more complex to the lay person, if they involve supported applications, chances are that support staff are familiar with both the issue as well as the remediation. In the event that these occur frequently, they might keep high-value resources trapped in a cycle of constantly reacting to and remediating break-fix incidents, thereby never allowing those personnel to diagnose the larger problem and develop a lasting solution.

To a staff already burdened by the proliferation of supported applications and a shift to working remotely, the increase in the volume of tickets and service requests is the last thing they need. The answer to these challenges lies in workspace management solutions which increase productivity and enable employees as well as support staff to focus on high value tasks. One of the keys to the success of these solutions is in the empowering of employees to serve themselves. Another is pushing automation to end-points so that issues are resolved without employee or help-desk intervention.

Contact me if you want to learn more about how you improve your remote workforce, and operations support productivity, or visit DRYiCE.ai