4 Best Practices for Working From Anywhere

For several years, the topics of hybrid and remote work have been interesting and relevant. As many business sectors adopted practices that changed the way they approach work, organizations have likewise faced persistent challenges, including maintaining security and ensuring that employee productivity is optimized during working hours.

Ultimately, you want to allow your workforce — and modern workplace — to be flexible, but you also want to limit the influence of external factors that negatively impact productivity.

There are lots of market shifts with hybrid and remote work, and best practices will continue to evolve and develop with the times, so your employees can work better from anywhere, be it in the office, at home or in a coffee shop.

Here are four best practices to consider when establishing or refreshing guidelines for your workforce to be secure, engaged and productive while working from anywhere.

If your workplace does not require employees to be present at a centralized office, they should be properly equipped to perform their jobs from a laptop, tablet or phone — so long as their preferred devices are authenticated.

Once you have ensured that all devices accessing business resources meet your organization’s security compliance and policy requirements, review your data loss prevention measures and know the exact steps to take when (not if) data breaches occur. Always err on the side of caution with cybersecurity.

Also consider seeking out third-party assistance when it comes to patch management. This kind of investment can lead to time and cost savings as well as lowering the overall attack surface of applications and devices accessing your critical business infrastructure.

Connectivity comes in a lot of different forms, so really, there are no right or wrong answers here. All methods of connectivity have pros and cons, and the demands of your business should drive how you choose to accomplish this.

There is the traditional internet jack for office settings, Wi-Fi access for private and public spaces and cloud authentication, which allows access to various applications and networks across different devices — not just Wi-Fi — with a centralized management system. Knowing what is on the network, who is on the network, what is happening on the network and how data is protected on the network is key.

When your staff is working from anywhere, prioritize clear communication channels, establish a VPN for secure access to company networks, and regularly educate your employees to reinforce strong password hygiene, such as generating user-specific phrases rather than complicated combinations difficult to remember.

Do you and your employees hold the knowledge to respond swiftly to data breaches, especially when information is highly sensitive?

There’s a saying that the best way to stay secure is to not be connected to anything. Short of that, there’s an inherent risk anytime anyone uses a device from anywhere to access data. This underscores the importance of having employees use a VPN to decrease the chance of being hacked via a public Wi-Fi hotspot.

Your employees must also be vigilant against phishing attempts and understand how to identify entities trying to exploit not just the technology but also the end users by taking advantage of human emotions of immediacy, reward and risk.

When thinking about security practices, consider developing a continuity plan, so that employees can work decentralized in an emergency-contingent way to continue serving clients. Also consider leveraging artificial intelligence-based detection methods to analyze and detect weaknesses in your modern technology stacks.

The best security starts with your employees. All rules and best practices are rendered ineffective if someone does something as simple and careless as leaving a device unattended at a café.

Don’t forget to regularly train your employees on healthy habits working remotely or in a hybrid environment. Check in on them regularly and be genuine and authentic when building rapport. You must trust your workforce as they are entrusted with much responsibility.

Your people are your most precious commodity.

CDW can boost your organization’s productivity through our decades-long partnerships with industry leaders and the deep knowledge bases of our solutions architects. We can help transform your distracted workforce into an engaged one suited to the modern workplace in the hybrid work era.

Recently, we assisted an aerospace client based in the Northeast to establish a disaster recovery business continuity program. We tapped our Work Anywhere team to provide the client with the best solution that flexibly allowed their end users to access data as necessary.

At CDW, we are committed to helping you keep your employees productive and happy in any setting and situation.