Remote working is a mode of work that allows employees to perform all their essential job responsibilities from anywhere other than a traditional office space. By working from home offices, these employees make up the remote workforce of an organization. A key principle of a remote workforce is that work is what you do, not where you do it. This means that remote workers should be able to be productive and accomplish all their daily work outside an organization’s office space.
To effectively engage a remote workforce, organizations need to provide technology, like video conferencing, that ensures a positive employee experience and company culture inside and outside the office.
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A remote workforce offers many benefits for both businesses and employees.
Benefits of a remote workforce for businesses include:
Benefits of remote work for employees include:
Technology is essential to remote work. For a remote workforce to be effective, the employee experience outside the office needs to be functionally identical to inside. This means remote employees must be able to access the files, software, and technology they need to be productive no matter where they work.
Technologies used for remote work include video conferencing, content collaboration platforms, and web and SaaS applications. However, relying on different point solutions for all these tools can lead to technology sprawl that overloads IT and detracts from the strong employee experience that remote workers need to be effective. With this in mind, the best path to empowering remote workers is a secure digital experience that brings all the tools and data that a remote workforce needs together onto one platform.
Organizations with a remote workforce face technological and business risks, but these challenges can be mitigated with the right approach.
First, organizations need to ensure their data and applications are secure when accessed remotely. Because remote employees access company resources and data on personal devices and public internet, it can be more challenging to protect sensitive data than it is for employees working in the office. These remote work security risks can be mitigated by securing access and using encryption to protect data on public networks.
Second, there's the issue of managing a remote workforce. Managers who aren’t experienced with remote teams can find it difficult to manage workers who aren’t in the same building. These managers may worry remote workers will neglect their responsibilities or fail to get work done outside the company’s office space. It can also be a challenge to fully integrate remote employees on a cultural level to ensure they feel like and act like team members rather than siloed workers.
The best way to mitigate these management risks is to ensure remote workers are accessible and connected to the rest of the team. Video conferencing check-ins with them can work similarly to face-to-face meetings with in-office employees. It’s also important to share expectations about how remote employees communicate and collaborate with coworkers to ensure the remote workforce knows how to work well with the rest of the team.
Under a remote work model, employees need to have secure, reliable access to apps and data—from any location and device. From desktop as a service (DaaS) to secure access and application delivery, Citrix provides a full range of solutions that empower organizations to successfully support this anywhere, anytime work.
