The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly shown that organizations that are able to adapt, especially with regards to their technological capabilities, are more resilient and capable of thriving during times of challenges. Whether that was facilitating work-from-home policies, enabling digital communications, or more, IT leaders across industries were able to overcome major disruptions and lead their businesses to success.
As we head into a new year, IT leaders should reflect on past transformations in order to prepare for another year of both uncertainty and hopefully, a post-pandemic world. In this blog post, we’ll share four ways to futureproof your organization’s information technology.
Be prepared for remote work at anytime
Whether your organization currently functions fully remotely, from a physical office, or a hybrid solution in between, you must be prepared for employees to work remotely at a second’s notice. IT has been and will continue to be crucial to facilitating communication both internally and externally, encouraging collaboration, and ensuring that employees have the equipment they need in order to thrive at their jobs. This can mean that your employees have identical desktops to what they have in the office, have access to voice over IP phones, be able to effectively share documents, and much more.
Ensure your onboarding process is remote-friendly.
An effective onboarding process is critical to improving employee retention and ensuring that your new hires are ready to hit the ground running on Day One. Research by Glassdoor has found that companies with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. As job creation continues to climb and a large number of people continue to voluntarily change jobs, creating an onboarding process that is remote-friendly is integral to driving success.
What does this actually mean? It means getting your employees online and connected to the rest of the workforce as soon as possible. If a new employee doesn’t have secure access to the training tools, communication apps, video conferencing software, and other resources, they will undoubtedly feel cut off from the rest of the company. They should also be able to have a digital human resources orientation so they can sign crucial documents, learn about benefits, and more.
Implement additional security measures for hybrid work situations.
Countless organizations have adopted a hybrid workforce model during the pandemic because it enables employees to work from anywhere with flexibility. And for many organizations, the hybrid model is here to stay because of the advantages and benefits it brings for both employees and organizations. If that’s the case with your organization, cybersecurity should be a key focus for your team. Even if you don’t have to be HIPAA-compliant, it’s crucial to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility to any sensitive data. This can mean preventing security breaches by segmenting the network to only allow authorized users to access sensitive data and crucial applications.
Review and update your daily IT checklist.
During the pandemic, many businesses have migrated to the Cloud. On the other hand, many businesses are still using legacy systems, so it’s common for IT operations to be a mix of old and new technologies that all need to stay up and running. That’s why it’s important to have well-documented and strictly-enforced IT operations in order to prevent any downtime that can drain productivity and hurt your bottom line.
If you don’t already have a daily IT operations checklist, we suggest putting one together or checking ours out here. And if you do, we suggest reviewing it and updating it with any of the changes your organization may have had to make due to the pandemic.
Get Started with Fuse.Cloud
If you’re looking for a reliable MSP, what we recommend is our one and only solution from Fuse.Cloud. We’re providing VoIP and fiber Internet connectivity services for thousands of customers, and our IT solution also offers proven Managed Networking, Firewall Services, Desktop/Server stack solutions for protecting your infrastructure. And it’s all wrapped in our 24x7x365 support.
Ready to confidently navigate 2022 with your daily IT operations and keep up in this quickly evolving digital age? Contact us today and let’s discuss how our reliable and proactive services can help your business become more resilient and successful.