Do You Have An Emergency Remote Work Plan?

With each day that passes, more and more businesses decide to send their staff home in order to keep them healthy and limit the spread of COVID-19. And while personal health is certainly the priority, it’s important to remember that a pandemic of this scale will affect the business world too.

As a business owner, you can’t just think about your personal safety – you have to think about your business’ continuity as well.

Do you have an emergency remote work plan in place right now?

Key Components Of An Effective Remote Work Plan

You need to meet with your team and answer these questions – sooner rather than later:

1. How Will Your Staff Access Their Work?
   

   • Will they need to connect to their office machines to use business software?
   • Can they work from their home machines?
   • Are a majority of your documents in the cloud (Microsoft Office 365) and your applications web-based or do they need access to applications installed on their office desktop machines?
   • Do they have a laptop that they could be taking home to work from?

2. How Will They Be Able To Access Their Office Phone?
   

   • How will you deal with incoming calls?
   • Will they use their own phones for outgoing calls?

3. How Will They Attend Meetings?
   

   • Do you need a web-based meeting setup? (e.g. Microsoft Teams)
   • If you will be holding video meetings, do they have cameras on their home machines?

Test Your Remote Work Plan Now

If at all possible, make sure to test your capabilities now so you can troubleshoot any unforeseen issues. Waiting until you have no choice but to quarantine your staff will undoubtedly lead to complications and obstacles in your business’ continuity.