How to make working from home…work!

The concept of remote or home working isn’t new, but its adoption has been painfully slow. In 2019, less than 3% of American’s – about…

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OpenText

May 6, 20204 minutes read

The concept of remote or home working isn’t new, but its adoption has been painfully slow. In 2019, less than 3% of American’s – about 4.7 million people – worked remotely. In 2015, it was 3.9 million. This represents an annual increase below 0.5%. Glacial-pace – right! The COVID-19 crisis has changed everything. Within a few short weeks, tens of millions of employees in organizations large and small suddenly became remote workers, leading Time Magazine to label it ‘the world’s largest work-from-home experiment’.

Discovering the benefits of remote working

You might expect this mass-migration to remote working to impact an organization’s productivity – but this is not something we experienced at OpenText™. And having spoken with a number of former colleagues at various companies across the globe, it seems that productively loss is not something to worry about as remote working becomes a new normal. It turns out that if you empower your staff and give them the tools they need to be productive, they are more committed, driven, and resilient than ever.

In fact, research conducted by Stanford University found that companies experience a 20% increase in productivity through remote working. The performance of individual employees improved by 13%.  A recent survey of US remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic found that 60% of the more experienced teleworkers found working at home to be more productive.

Increased productivity is just one of the benefits of a remote workforce. Employee satisfaction and retention are also improved with remote work. Stanford’s research also demonstrated that remote working can lead to a 50% drop in employee attrition. Add to these figures findings that show it costs an organization $11,000 per employee per year less to employ remote workers and it can also realize $10,000 per employee, per year in real estate savings.

Creating enterprise-strength remote working capabilities

While a significant number of organizations have been building their remote working capabilities for years, the rapid transition to what effectively is a new model has not been entirely smooth for them. For others, the need to establish the remote infrastructure on the fly has led to numerous issues around lack of equipment, insufficient broadband access, inefficient data and information sharing, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, as well as governance and compliance challenges.

To be successful in the long term, a structured approach to delivering enterprise-strength remote working capabilities is required. Secure, stable, and high-performance information access and collaboration has to be established regardless of location, connectivity preferences, or technical requirements.

The role of a cloud-based, multiplatform site-to-site VPN solution

When we fully recover from the COVID-19 crisis, we’ll be in a new world. This new normal for business will have remote working as a major tool for cost savings, productivity, and innovation for businesses across the globe. However, the remote working infrastructures that businesses create have to be more feature-rich, stable, and secure than the temporary environments that have sprung up over the last weeks and months.

A cloud-based, remote access solution – such as OpenText™ PositivePro  – provides everything necessary for employees, partners, and providers to connect seamlessly and securely to an intranet or any other resource on a corporate network. It delivers the enterprise-strength remote working capabilities that your staff needs to fulfill the potential of home working for your business.

An enterprise site-to-site VPN solution is the gateway to productivity

Fast and easy access for remote users

Some site-to-site VPNs can make it quick and easy to establish a remote connection to the home worker, between offices and with suppliers and contractors. By removing the complex remote-side administration burden, remote workers can become productive in minutes or hours rather than weeks or months. Administrators can configure remote desktops in minutes. Employees have complete access to their resources as if they were directly attached to the corporate network. More than this, through simplified system and security management capabilities, governance is established from the outset – even before the connections are established.

Robust security and control

The best site-to-site VPNs provide enterprise-level security controls for end-users and sites to meet regulatory compliance. IT administrators can centrally configure and control the security and end-user experience. In addition to local firewall and virus protection, you gain access to the latest security features such as integrated multi-factor authentication, real-time intrusion detection, and comprehensive endpoint protection.

Centralized policy management

Network administrators have central control to maintain and enforce security policies for all groups and individual remote access users. Administrators can manage policies, configuration settings, and actions for each user. The organization can establish the remote working and security policies from the outset – which govern the activities of each individual user – allowing you maximum flexibility in creating user environments that fit business needs while ensuring compliance.

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OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight through market-leading information management solutions, powered by OpenText Cloud Editions.

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