As some offices encourage (or outright demand) that employees return to the physical workplace, many more businesses have made a permanent shift to working from home. While many organizations have reported benefits from the change, it hasn’t been without growing pains. One of the clearest drawbacks to the WFH transition is the breakdown of typical intraoffice communications for collaboration and support.
In no other area is that drawback as clear as in IT. Not every business owner is a bona fide computer scientist, and many rank-and-file employees have little technical experience outside of the basic tools that they use for their daily work. With its need for privacy and data security, remote work often requires more advanced solutions, which can be confusing for workers.
In the past, it was easy to phone IT and ask someone to walk down the hallway or ride up the elevator to visit a worker’s desk and resolve an issue. With workforces more physically separate today, that scenario is not achievable—and no IT team member wants to make house calls.
Avoiding the need for a remote IT solution isn’t the answer. Consider why robust IT is such a vital element of success for businesses that emphasize remote work, whether in-house or sourced from a third-party vendor.
Why Your IT Team Is Mission-Critical
It’s easy to overlook the importance of IT if you only think of the department as a help desk. While the tech support that they provide when hardware breaks down or software malfunctions is essential, this team’s use runs far deeper than that.
Here are a few of the key areas in which your IT department functions as part of the backbone for a business:
- Technology maintenance. The best tools for business change all the time, and frequent updates to software are necessary to stay up to date with the latest security and functionality patches. A strong IT team ensures that your tools of the trade are current, providing both peace of mind and the capability to get the job done.
- Onboarding and training. Who’s responsible for helping new users get acquainted with proprietary systems and industry-specific software? It’s the IT team—especially in remote work contexts, where there’s no one in a nearby cubicle to ask. Without technology pros who understand the tools that you use well, it will take much longer to onboard new employees and bring them to a functional level of competence.
- Data storage and continuity. With businesses generating more data than ever, keeping track of it all is a major challenge—especially when you have users working with their local computer storage at home. IT’s job is to ensure that these documents have robust security in place and remain recoverable in case of an equipment failure. No one wants to lose a major chunk of their operating data because of a computer failure.
- Support. Don’t overlook the value of tech support, because consistent support resolves problems quickly and keeps individual users productive. In a WFH environment, an IT team equipped with remote access can continue helping users even if they’re many states away from the office. With workers losing an average of two weeks of productivity each year because of technical problems, support is essential.
With so many contributions across these four areas, it’s easy to see that capable IT is not an option—it’s a necessity.
What Is IT’s Role in Remote Work?
Is your IT team’s expertise suited to the realities of working from home? While we touched on a few of the tasks of WFH IT, there is more to it than simply using remote screen viewing tools or shepherding data into the appropriate cloud systems.
Consider work life without an IT team when a significant issue develops with a software tool that enables your remote teams to connect and collaborate. Your only recourse might be to try the vendor’s help hotline, or to spend hours scouring search engine results for problems similar to yours. Meanwhile, no one gets their work done, and you lose productivity minute by minute.
What about support? Founders seldom have the time to be troubleshooters for every employee, but that can be the position that you find yourself in without a sufficient IT team.
Why IT Is Essential for a Remote Business or Startup’s Survival
It is much easier to set yourself up for success than it is to turn around and make improvements later. Just as you wouldn’t build a home and then try to put a foundation underneath it, remote startups need to establish robust IT from the beginning. While that does mean carving out additional space in your budget, it’s worth the expense when you spend correctly.
With IT infrastructure in place from the start, you can enjoy expert assistance in selecting and deploying the solutions that will enable a geographically diverse team to work together seamlessly. Quick resolutions keep minor bottlenecks from spiraling into major slowdowns and lost productivity. This team can also grow and adapt alongside your business, providing you with a vital support structure during the most critical phase of a company’s early life.
Setting Up Your Teams for Success—Today and Tomorrow
Although working from home has dramatically changed the way that some businesses operate, it hasn’t eliminated some of the fundamental problems that workers face every day. Without a dependable IT team, bottlenecks occur, slowdowns compound, and a business cannot function at its peak. For startups and other companies that incorporate full-time remote work, it could spell disaster.
Avoiding those issues is simple, whether it means maintaining your existing IT department and expanding its WFH technological expertise or hiring a remote IT business to provide on-demand support. By making robust IT support a pillar of the way that you do business, you can solve problems and accomplish more with each day.
Next time you’re evaluating the progress that you’ve made, make sure to share a “thanks!” with your IT team leaders.
