Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Meta’s enforced hybrid work plan is failing badly, and Meta makes more layoffs. (more…)
Tag: remote workers
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80% of Bosses ‘Regret’ Stopping WFH ¦ PSA: Disable STS!
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Rethinking return-to-office mandates and a ridiculous, ancient Windows bug. (more…)
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WTH? WFH is 6× Pre-Covid ¦ Plus: Agile Sucks (Redux)
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Working from home is here to stay, and Agile is still a failure. (more…)
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Dead Downtown: It’s YOUR Fault | Pentagon’s FOUR Cloud Vendors | Apple Adds MORE Price Flexibility
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Home working is ripping the heart out of cities, the DoD’s bizarre cloud strategy, and Apple adds a $10,000 app price option. (more…)
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Akamai: Buying Linode | Firefox: Not OK | Gone: Google Vaccine Mandate
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Linode gets bought by Akamai, Firefox market share is “measly,” and Google brings staff back to the office.
1. Akamai + Aker = ‘Synergy’
First up this week: Why is Akamai buying Linode? Whatever the reason, it’s a big payday for its solitary shareholder: Not far off a billion dollars.
Analysis: There goes the neighborhood?
The 100 lb gorilla of edge computing and CDNs is promising not to mess with Linode’s winning open source cloud formula: No change, steady as she goes, etcetera. But how many times have we heard that before?
Here’s local scribbler Paige Gross: Linode’s $900M acquisition by Akamai is a ‘game changer’
A household name in the Philly tech scene … CEO Christopher Aker founded the company in 2003, and it’s been bootstrapped ever since, growing to about 250 employees. … Aker has owned 100% of Linode since he founded it.
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Aker said the deal brings the company closer to solving evolving challenges “as cloud services become all-encompassing, including compute, storage, security and delivery from core to edge. … We’ve been talking about ‘alternative cloud’ — alternative to the big guy — and now we’ve sort of validated ourself in this market.”
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The Old City company maintains “well over a million accounts” but has anywhere around 150,000 active users of its platform at any particular time. Linode’s HQ, the bank building at Third and Arch Streets, remains. … For clients and Linode employees, there won’t be too much noticeable change [Linode] says.
Why does Akamai want Linode? Jonathan Greig asked the CEO:Akamai CEO Tom Leighton [explained] that Linode has great customer support and is already in 11 locations, which Akamai is going to “dramatically” expand. … Leighton also noted the September 2021 acquisition of Israel-based Guardicore, a cybersecurity company that offers a micro-segmentation solution to reduce the potential attack surface of corporate networks, secure applications, and meet compliance standards.
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According to Leighton, the company is expecting the cloud compute category — which includes edge applications, its net storage business, and Linode — to reach “well over half a billion dollars in 2023. … We were pioneers in edge computing and now we’re taking a big step forward in cloud computing with Linode.”
But here’s a worried-sounding zoid.com:Well good for them but I hope [Akamai] don’t screw it up. Linode is a great hosting company.
2. Firefox isn’t OK
Last week, a journalist innocently asked, “Is Firefox OK?” And people lost their minds.
Analysis: No, not OK—it’s a big problem for DevOps and the web.
We need Firefox and Gecko. A Chromium monoculture is bad for the web and bad for DevOps. (Before you ask: No, the existence of WebKit doesn’t change things, thanks to Apple’s ridiculous policies). Much as I tried to say something nice about Firefox last month, its market share is, frankly, pathetic.
Matt Burgess: Is Firefox OK?
In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape … the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. … Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole.
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Each year Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. … In its 2020 financial results … Mozilla listed its total revenue as $496 million. … The Google-Mozilla deal was last renewed in 2020 and is expected to expire in 2023. … Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money.
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Firefox still matters: … The browser market is dominated by Google’s Chromium codebase and its underlying browser engine, Blink. … Microsoft’s Edge Browser, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera all use adapted versions of Chromium. Apple [has] its WebKit browser engine [but] other than that, Firefox’s Gecko browser engine is the only alternative.
Firefox, how do we love thee? Let not_count_zero count the ways:I still use Firefox because:
a) I remember Internet Explorer and the standards wars. …
b) I don’t trust Google. …
c) Most sites work well.
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I do have questions though. … They’re currently getting around a half a billion‽ What are they doing with it? … This seems really off—really, really off.
But heed a deeply worried Thom Holwerda:The decline and potential demise of Firefox is a massive problem that everybody seems to be kind of tiptoeing around—too afraid to acknowledge that if Firefox were indeed to disappear, we’d be royally screwed. We’d end up right back where we started 20 years ago, with Chrome being the new IE6.
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The situation is especially dire for … Linux users, developers, and distribution makers. … Gnome Browser or KDE’s Falkon can barely be taken seriously, and … are based on Apple’s WebKit, which isn’t a great position to be in.
3. Google’s Return to Work Plan Drops Vaccine Mandate
Google is planning “celebrations” to welcome back employees after being fully remote. And in practice—unlike at IBM—this doesn’t mean a vaccine mandate.
Analysis: Vocal minority wins—or do they?
It was just three months ago that Google said it “firmly stands behind our vaccination policy.” What changed? It’s unlikely to have been due to a tiny minority of staff publishing a manifesto.
Jennifer Elias: Google relaxes mandates
The company will no longer require vaccination as a condition of employment … as it prepares to bring workers back to the office … at least three days a week for a “hybrid” work model. … The company [had previously] told employees that they must comply with vaccine policies or they’d face loss of pay and eventually loss of employment.
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According to Google spokesperson Lora Lee Erickson … the company dropped the requirement … after removing the Jan. 18 deadline it had set for employees to either get vaccinated or get exemption approval. She declined to provide further details on the policy or the reasons for the reversal.
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Google Real Estate and Workplace Services VP David Radcliffe [said Google] is preparing to begin its 30-day transition period to the hybrid work week if conditions continue to improve. He said his team is planning “celebrations” to welcome back employees. … Unvaccinated employees who are approved to enter offices will still need to follow additional protocols, including testing and wearing a mask.
It’s too simplistic to say the anti-mandate brigade are also anti-vaxxers. For example, raxxorrax:I am vaccinated and HR knows this. … But if they officially demanded a certificate, I think I would have called it quits. Many people don’t have that option [but] there are consequences for such unreasonable demands.
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I understand a mandate for vaccinations in certain occupations relating to health. It is something you have to personally accept if you want to work in the field.
Although a few others are way over at the end of the bell curve. Greg Jinkerson:Don’t get excited, [Google is] still evil and stupid. … Now they’re backing down for some reason, [but] this is barely anything notable as far as a rollback of restrictions. [It] is not any kind of encouraging news.
The Moral of the Story: Failure is the foundation of success—and the means by which it is achieved.
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.Image: Aleksey Kuprikov (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)
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Plutora’s Bob Davis: Work From Home and Value Stream Management
American writer Orison Swett Marden said, “Success is not measured by what you accomplish but by the opposition you have encountered and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.” After the year that’s passed, with operations and development teams forced to scatter and work remotely, it’s a sentiment DevOps teams are currently all too familiar with.
This demand to keep DevOps teams productive under the extraordinary circumstance of 2020 has placed an increased emphasis on effective management, including on value stream management tools, so leaders and team members can have greater visibility into delivery pipelines.
To get a sense of the state of the value stream management market, I reached out to Bob Davis, chief marketing officer at value stream management platform provider Plutora. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
George Hulme: Thanks for taking the time today, Bob. Could you tell us a little about Plutora?
Bob Davis: We are a value stream management platform provider. When I first arrived here, we recognized that sales, marketing, financial and human resources teams all have their systems of record. They have Salesforce, ERP (enterprise resource management) systems, and various financial and HR platforms that enable people to practice their profession more easily. IT didn’t have anything like that at the time.
We set out to provide that capability for the software development side of IT. Today, the market is caught up. Everybody is moving into value stream management as a platform to provide that visibility across an entire toolchain, from the idea to production. That’s where we play. We’ve been in this space since it began over two years ago. The market is just exploding with the work-from-home trend, and how the pandemic kicked digital transformation into high gear.
Hulme: It appears that a significant percentage of the work-from-home trend is here to stay. I’m seeing surveys showing about 19% of people previously suspected that they’d be working from home in a year. That figure jumped now to near 50%.
Davis: If you start to parse what work from home means, you’ll find it means many different things to different organizations. Some have a hybrid model with people working from home two to three days a week. I recently read a Gartner survey that said 74% of organizations were going to have some element of work from home. It’s not all or nothing.
Some companies have decided that they are not going back to work until well into this year. All of these companies have to make sure they have governance compliance in place for this new workforce, and that they can successfully manage the complexities of software development. These challenges are at least an order of magnitude, if not more so, more difficult than typical office workers working from home.
Hulme: Is one of the reasons behind those challenges struggling to maintain being on the same page across the organization?
Davis: That’s a great point, George, because when we go out with our teams at many organizations, a lot of the effort helps people fast-track their processes. We are asked, “What is the best practice for automating builds? How often should I be automating builds? What KPIs do I establish to make sure that people are striving to accomplish what we need them to accomplish?”
For example, one of the things that Lean and Agile methodologies promote are smaller work items, quicker check-ins, faster processes. They encourage cutting work down into smaller bundles to be done more quickly so that teams can iterate much more rapidly. We’ve seen that managers will often create a KPI for a performance management program to measure how often code gets checked.
That’s horrible because now I can just check in code all the time. Yet, are people making actual progress? Are they actually delivering software, or are they just checking in small iterations of code all day?
Organizations have to be very careful with how they manage people. They have to be cautious with what metrics they set up to keep their eye on delivering value and delivering software more quickly. This is something organizations struggle with. They want to know where to start and what metrics they need to implement. And how to make those metrics visible so people can see and understand them. That’s what provides the ability for product owners, managers, executives and other stakeholders to view the progress and status of what’s going on without disrupting people with calls and endless meetings.
Hulme: That has to be tremendously more challenging with the work-from-home trend than years prior.
Davis: I recently heard a great quote: “As people end up working from home, the need for human contact and human interaction, socialization, is peaking.” People are hungry for that. At the same time, the need for managers to not be in the face of the employees has never been higher. That is, the motivation and the productive nature of employees is proportional to how well they feel trusted. And it’s proportional to how well they understand where they’re headed and understand how to do their job and are left alone to do that job.
It’s a leap of faith to leave people alone and simply trust them. You need systems that provide you the ability to collaborate; watch the progress. You need systems that will help you understand where people might be struggling, all without having to dig in and micromanage your people. Indeed, as we are learning, managers can effectively do this with Zoom, or Slack, or some other tool that provides good communication flow within a work-from-home environment. But in software, the handoffs and dependencies are so complicated that those tools are simply not enough. You need a collaboration tool that provides effective management in software development.
Hulme: Do you believe remote development teams can communicate as collaboratively as they did in person, with modern software collaboration tools?
Davis: Yes, I think they can. Especially when office collaboration tools, such as Zoom and Slack, and software collaboration tools work together. We can leverage Slack to communicate tasks. So we not only layer on top of the individual tools people have and integrate with them, the practitioners working within those tools can make it available to all of those stakeholders involved in that process. And when there are tasks or handoffs, the system can be configured to notify them how they prefer to work: email, Slack, instant messenger, task list on the dashboard. There’s a lot of different ways, depending on how people want to work.
Not only that, but it can automatically alert people to what is happening and what’s needed. Fascinatingly, one of the interesting yet deceptively tricky questions to get an answer to is, “Where’s the status of a feature?” If a team is in the process of building something out, and they have a specific feature, such as check cashing in a banking app, it should be a pretty straightforward question to get answered.
Yet, about seven or eight different teams are working on various aspects of that application. For instance, there’s a product owner who, without the right collaboration system, has to go and essentially track all of those teams down and find out where their status is.
With a software collaboration system, you can make that query without bugging anybody. In some respects, you can collaborate more efficiently and more productively than you can when you’re all sitting in the same room. That’s because before, we would have walked over and interrupted somebody. Now you’re just looking at a dashboard, or you’ve gotten an alert on Slack, and you see what you need. Boom.
Hulme: How important do you think it is to have useful data and that value stream knowing where things stand to keeping the system flowing and individuals knowing where they fit on deliverables?
Davis: I think the ambiguity, unexplained delays and unforced errors are among the things that upset human beings the most. Just ask somebody that’s standing in a line that’s not moving, and it hasn’t moved in a while; how restless the crowd gets. The nature of software development is such that there are tremendous numbers of handoffs, no matter how you do your development. It doesn’t, whether it’s an old fashioned waterfall or the most advanced development and deployment models in operations at places like Spotify — you have a lot of handoffs. And if you can’t see what you’re doing because you don’t have visibility into those parts, then you’re going to run into an incredibly frustrated team. And you are going to see a lot of finger-pointing when the question comes up, “Why didn’t this release go out?” And then there’ll be five or six different groups pointing to different reasons. You get a lot of anger, a lot of discontent. And it’s something you have to avoid if you are going to succeed.
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New ASG Report Looks at COVID-19’s Impact on Software Development
We are all trying to adapt to a new world created by COVID-19. As the coronavirus continues to spread, the economy and businesses everywhere have been severely impacted, and no one really knows what the so-called “new normal” will be. For now, most organizations have gone remote, not knowing when—or even if—employees will be able to return to their offices.
While some organizations have been open to the idea of working remotely, many have also struggled to shift to a remote workforce seemingly overnight. For software developers, however, remote work is nothing new. Many developers have successfully worked remotely before the COVID-19 pandemic even started.
“The Future of Remote Work and Software Development“ research published today by Accelerated Strategies Group dives into the long-term impact of a decentralized workforce on software development and delivery. ASG interviewed 347 industry leaders from around the world to gather and refine data on the impact of COVID-19 on software teams and their organizations’ ability to create software, and the importance of remote work tools and applications during the pandemic.
The ASG report, commissioned by CloudBees, revealed some interesting trends. The survey found 63% of respondents said digital transformation objectives have significantly or somewhat increased in priority. Business automation (61.6%) and the need for investment in creating contactless services (60.1%) have increased somewhat or significantly.
More than half of the respondents said the COVID-19 conditions have increased their focus on DevOps initiatives (51.75%) and increased their progress on cloud migration (52.25%). Also worth noting is the growth in companies’ DevOps and Agile adoption, with 46.24% of respondents stating they are using cross-functional teams, 55.64% practicing daily stand-up meetings and 43.23% automating tasks.
The majority of respondents (59.49%) to the ASG report saw an increase in productivity on software teams since the pandemic started. Forty-two percent of respondents said it has become somewhat easier to complete their work tasks in a timely manner.
However, feedback concerning respondents’ ability to manage unproductive distractions was mixed: 39.7% said managing these distractions was somewhat or much easier, 36.36% said it was somewhat or much more difficult and 23.48% said they had no change in their ability to manage these distractions.
When asked to provide insight into the potential negative impact of their remote workforce on productivity, more than one-third (38.6%) of respondents said there was no change, 27.58% of respondents indicated that teams were slowed down significantly or somewhat and 33.83% said things moved along significantly or somewhat faster.
The majority of remote workers (64.4%) expect to remain working remotely, either permanently or at least three or more days per week, once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. Only 12.7% said they anticipate returning to an office location full-time.
For the most part, the transition to working from home has benefited software teams. COVID-19 has not only impacted the global economy, but also business priorities and has accelerated business and software strategies. Though the future is uncertain, and no one has a clear picture of what the “new normal” looks like, there is a huge possibility many software and DevOps teams won’t return to the office—at least not full-time.
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Report: As WFH Took Hold, Few Adjusted Their Security Posture
In March of this year, how employees worked (if they were fortunate enough to be able to continue to work), changed dramatically following state-led shelter-in-place orders. At first, it was hoped the shift would be a matter of weeks. But as the pandemic continued and weeks stretched to months—and now with more organizations extending their work-from-home (WFH) policies well into 2021, there’s currently no real end in sight.
What’s the impact of WFH been on security? Security firm Malwarebytes recently completed a report, “Enduring from Home: COVID-19’s Impact on Business Security,” that looks at precisely this issue. The report examines Malwarebytes’ malware data and a survey of 200 technology and information security decision-makers among large and small organizations.
The survey found that organizations are confident in their ability to transition to an increasingly remote workforce successfully. Essentially, 73% rated their organization as a high or higher in their WFH preparedness. For those organizations with fewer than 700 staffers, 84% said they moved more than half of their employees to remote work. However, 84% of larger organizations, those with 700 employees or more, said they’d moved almost all their workforce home.
Disappointingly, despite the profound changes to staff working situations, 45% of those surveyed did not conduct either security or online privacy analyses of their software tools.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, 20% of respondents said they witnessed security breaches as a result of a remote worker, and 24% said remote worker security breaches created unexpected security expenses. Further, 28% said that they now use personal devices for work more than they did previously, and 61% of those surveyed said that their employers didn’t recommend staff install anti-malware on their personal endpoints.
Not surprisingly, criminals are adapting to the new worker landscape, adjusting techniques to target poorly configured virtual private networks, cloud services and email. “There has also been a surge in phishing emails that use COVID-19 as a lure to cover up malicious activity. These emails contain commercial malware, such as AveMaria and NetWiredRC, which allow for remote desktop access, webcam control, password theft and more,” Malwarebytes said in a statement.
The study also found that AveMaria malware increased by more than 1,200% from January to April. This malware targeted primarily large enterprises, the company found. In contrast, Malwarebytes detected a near-doubling in infections from NetWiredRC, which targets small and medium-sized organizations.
What’s most concerning with these findings isn’t that criminals have shifted tactics due to a change in how staffers work; that’s to be expected and enterprises don’t have control over what attackers will do. But enterprises do have control over how they defend themselves. And as enterprises increasingly turned to cloud and collaboration platforms to make their WFH situations work, they should have updated their threat models to reflect the new reality. As this new reality continues, one can hope organizations better evaluate their current environments and adjust their security posture accordingly.
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Managing Remotely: 6 Ways to Support Engineers
Managing remote engineers effectively comes with a host of considerations. Here are six to keep in mind
Dear 2020, we’d like our deep work back.
Our shift to remote work in 2020 moved the majority of face-to-face interactions into screens. Although initially we assumed this shift was a temporary adjustment, most of us now realize it’s just the opposite. Twitter, Facebook, Shopify, Slack, Box and more have publicly declared remote work is here to stay and they are not alone—84% of businesses now report they will increase remote work post-COVID-19 pandemic.
With our new reality came next-level distractions—homeschoolers, playful pets, social unrest and, oh yes, a scary global pandemic. Moreover, the lockdowns rewired our collaboration habits, stretched our bandwidth, and threatened our ability to focus on our best work.
As a result, managers—the forgotten middle of the workforce—are emerging as quiet heroes fighting to protect team effectiveness. At Uplevel, we’ve worked with engineers nationwide and have learned the top ways that managers can help their engineers empower their best work:
Mind the Meetings
Engineers want their managers to protect their time for deep work. They are constantly bombarded with changing priorities that require endless meetings, crushing their ability to dive in, solve problems and innovate. How bad is it? Of the 250 engineers and managers we interviewed, 50% of individual contributors reported that more than twice a week they don’t have enough time to do their work, with 19% of engineers reporting it’s an issue every day. Bottom line: If a meeting “coulda been an email,” make it so.
Say No to Micromanagement
Nobody likes the helicopter parents of work. The constant hover erodes trust, destroys morale and slows down otherwise efficient, effective people. Top performers will tell you, autonomy contributes to their overall happiness at work, and research continually tells us that happy employees are more productive and they stick around longer. Instead of spinning on the minutia, make it your mission to block distractions and tackle bottlenecks for them so they are empowered and available to do their best work. More than one-third—39%—of engineers are blocked on issues they can’t unblock themselves at least once a week. That’s a weekly chance to free your team to do their best work.
Embrace Flexibility
For the sake of protecting “the flow,” it’s a good time to go with the flow, too. Overly structured, old-school project management must give way to the fluid, flexible tools empowering us to get work done anytime, anywhere. Embrace a project management style that is as fluid as your team’s changing priorities and consider light-touch micro check-ins that leave room to revisit the game plan weekly.
More Comms, Not Less
Right now, it’s easy for individual contributors to feel both socially and professionally isolated. As a result, their confidence waivers and paranoid flares as they question whether their contributions make an impact or get noticed at all. Now is not the time to back off of communications. Don’t confuse this with “respecting personal boundaries.” If you’re worried that communicating will somehow exert unintended pressure, simply establish clear expectations and model them by example. A simple way to lean into communications is to make them more frequent, much shorter and less formal. By acting more like a coach than a manager, you’ll not only keep the team focused on the right tasks but you’ll also show them you care about their well-being beyond “the work.”
Lead By Example
The quickest way to zap trust and kill morale is by ignoring your own rules. Engineers want their managers to lead by example and consistently exhibit the same behaviors they expect from their teams. If it’s respecting work/life balance (and refraining from midnight emails), don’t hit the send button until it’s time. If it’s a commitment to stay present during group meetings, stop multitasking. If it’s a promise to wear pants on Zoom calls, put your pants on. You get the point: Don’t create rules for remote teams that you’re unwilling to follow yourself.
Create Opportunities To Connect
You’ve heard it time and again since March: We’re in this together. It’s true. No one rolled into the pandemic with a playbook; managers and their teams are winging it. Forced isolation is not a normal human state and it shows. Across the country, doctors report more cases of depression, domestic violence and substance abuse. In fact, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows the pandemic is taking its toll—45% of adults say this pandemic has affected their mental health. Another study by mental health provider Ginger found 69% of employees admit this pandemic has been the most stressful time of their career. How can you help? Use this collective behavioral beta test as an opportunity to show empathy and connect. Are team happy hours gone? Replace them with the dogs and cats of Zoom at the beginning of your weekly meeting. Are team lunches no longer doable? Have virtual outdoor picnics and encourage your team to get some fresh air. Be creative—it’s a great time to rally around the things that connect us as humans, not just teammates.
Thanks to the COVID pandemic, 64% of us now commute from our beds to our home office (or the kitchen table, or sofa). That’s a ninefold increase in four months. As it turns out, many of us don’t mind the change. A full 60% of us would actually prefer to keep it this way. If our engineering teams stay virtual, it’s our job to empower them so that remote work can still bring about their best work. As we embrace this ever-changing world, now is the time to tap into our empathy and communication and leverage the data and technology available to us to ensure we turn hardship into innovation.
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The IT Admin’s Checklist for a Newly Remote Company
A few simple tips can help keep your remote workers productive and relatively stress-free during the new WFH paradigm
Months into adjusting to COVID-19 impacts, organizations are now living in the day-to-day that was built on—let’s be honest—somewhat rushed plans to get everyone remote as quickly as possible. The image of repairing a bus while the bus is also driving its normal route comes to mind. Quick reactivity like this is vital in the moment, but it can be easy to miss a step along the way.
Of course, IT is central to business continuity. This has only been made more true when so much of remote work relies on technology. Now is the time to make sure that your organization is truly set up to excel in remote conditions.
But the mission for IT teams can’t just be to remain operational in the short term. We’ve got to look ahead and chart a course for long-term success: processes, tools, security measures and automation. We must ask, as IT admins, how can we help our teams thrive in this pivotal moment as well as the next?
We’ve broken down the steps IT admins can take to ultimately set their entire team up for success as we all adjust to remote work.
How an IT Admin Can Support Remote Work
Step 1: Safety First
With changes in every part of their life, your workforce is focused on one thing first: their personal safety and that of their loved ones.
If you haven’t already shifted as much of your team as possible to a work-from-home model, now is better than never. This demonstrates to your people that you care about them and trust them, which is foundational for getting amazing work done.
For organizations that are already remote, now is the time to dot the I in information and cross the T in technology. Do your due diligence as an IT team to ensure you have taken all of the necessary steps to make remote work a sustainable practice. Fortunately, you’re in just the right spot for that—just keep reading!
Step 1.5: Professional Safety, Too
Safety also encompasses job security. People fear for themselves and their families in this tumultuous time. Economic downturn brings anxiety, period. Even when your company has prioritized personal safety by going remote, there can still be uncertainty in whether someone’s paycheck is safe.
You might not realize it, but as IT professionals, you have influence over job anxiety within your organization. Every time a tool or system functions perfectly, you’ve made what could have been a stressful day that much better. Simply put, you let people focus on their jobs instead of technology.
Take pride in this! Give your team members comfort that you are going to make it as easy as possible for them to take care of their responsibilities. You’ll ensure that they have the tools and systems to succeed to help them retain their jobs. People who can focus on their jobs instead of stressing about tools are more able to make a big impact.
Step 2: Make Remote Work Happen for Your Team
Once safety is covered, it’s about the technology—hardware and software. There’s good news here: According to Buffer’s “2020 State of Remote Work,” 98% of employees would like to work remotely at least some of the time. That means that what we’re all going through to support the necessity of remote work now will hopefully set up organizations for higher employee satisfaction in the future.
Whether you’re still in the process of streamlining remote work or you had to rush the process, let’s start at the beginning. You’ll need to ensure that everybody has systems that they can take home with them. If everyone doesn’t have a laptop, create a sign-out process for their desktop machines and any other equipment that they may need. (Psst … You can do this retroactively if your organization already let folks take technology home without a formal process.)
In the beginning, it may have seemed like we could get through this time with the bare minimum, but making employees work harder because of a lack of resources simply won’t benefit the bottom line. It’s not too late to set up your team’s homes with high-quality monitors, printers, other peripherals and even chairs and desks, if necessary.
Pro tip: Educate your team on how to adjust their screen resolutions, if that’s a feature on their computer. It’s not something the average computer user knows to do, but it can eliminate the need for a larger monitor and save a few headaches (literally!).
Step 3: Provide Access to IT Resources
The next tick on the checklist is to ensure that everybody knows how to access their IT resources. For better or worse, no one is walking over to your desk to ask how to login to their email anymore. (Actually, that’s almost certainly for the better.) Now is the time for education and self-serve training to benefit the entire team while we’re working away from the office.
If your organization is accustomed to a mobile environment, your users should know how to VPN into the network or securely access applications in the data center or elsewhere. If not, now is the time to teach them.
As with all times of change, there will be (and probably have already been) many questions. Tighten your process for accepting requests and answering questions. Survey the rest of the IT team for gaps and pain points that have come up in the initial months to ensure you can efficiently continue to support the adjustment period.
And, most importantly, take the time to document all of the pathways for people to be productive and do their work. Regardless of your company’s familiarity, this will enable better training going forward and give you resources to use when colleagues have questions.
Step 4: Manage the IT Fleet
Now that your team is generally enabled to do their work, you need to ensure that you have visibility into the entire environment. Ask yourself these important questions:
- Do you know all of the IT resources in use across your organization?
- Do you have full control over access to all IT resources?
- What about full control over their systems to ensure that you can fix issues, maintain security and configure and control their computer environment properly?
Insight into these mission-critical questions doesn’t always come easy, but it enables your IT team to manage, control and secure all systems. It’s also foundational to being compliant with regulations and company security policies (which don’t stop, even when the whole world does).
If any of the above questions gave you pause, we probably don’t have to tell you that something needs to change. Rogue IT resources threaten the organization legally and can be a financial drain—but the solution can be as simple as one tool to manage the whole suite. More on that later.
Step 5: Secure Your Now-Dispersed Environment
A key part of gaining control is securing the environment without making security the bane of your team’s existence.
Security isn’t a new imperative, so let’s revisit the six core activities we recommend here:
- Enforce unique access and segment resources.
- Lock down computers and servers.
- Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- Implement full disk encryption (FDE).
- Enforce password complexity and MFA.
- Conduct regular security awareness training.
Don’t forget to train your team and provide strong guidance on how you would like them to operate to ensure security. Make compliance a team effort by explaining the why behind all of your security guidance to make it more tangible for people.
Can Your Technology Support Remote Work?
Your management tools will largely define your ability to operate securely. The right tool will make something essential like MFA seamless, ensuring end user security without adding friction to anyone’s day. If you’re not happy with your current system, now’s a great time to do the research to find one that makes everyone happy, from IT to the end users.
Of course, the exact features you’ll prioritize in your search will depend on your specific organization. To get you started here’s a list of the basics of what you should expect your IT management tool to do for you in this remote work period:
- Compliance-focused security. Look for password complexity management, multi-factor authentication (MFA), policy management, and SSH key authentication, plus whatever’s important for your individual organization’s priorities.
- Easy integration with all of your current tools. Does your team use both G Suite and Microsoft 365? A good management tool shouldn’t make you pick.
- A streamlined database that centralizes the IT environment. When all users and IT resources are integrated into a directory service, IT admins gain a controlled, automated environment.
- Provides easy-to-use single sign-on (SSO) to web applications. Secure, convenient application access is essential and made simple with SSO.
- Built to optimize your team’s productivity. Technology is only as important as the people who wield it. Choose technology that is intuitive and built with humans in mind.
Final Thoughts
While we may not have much certainty right now, one thing is for sure: Success largely will be built from home in the coming months and perhaps years. Being productive while also creating a healthy WFH culture is paramount, and IT teams have a huge role in accomplishing this task.
The steps we’ve reviewed above are an effective way to help your team feel safe physically and be able to succeed at their jobs. Here they are again, a bit more boiled down:
- Prioritize employee safety.
- Support teams with the tools they need.
- Provide seamless, managed access to IT resources.
- Maintain and, if possible, increase security.
Besides the supporting technology, the most important thing for these steps to be successful is the IT professionals guiding them! Remember how positive your impact can be during this stressful time and set your sights on not just reacting to this moment but proactively preparing your team for any remote working circumstance.
Recommended for you: Want more on how to be your team’s IT key to successful remote work? For the A-Z handbook that covers everything from password policies to directory integration, download the IT Admin’s full guide to working at home here.