Enabling Your Remote Workforce Under In creased External Pres sures

Enabling Your Remote Workforce Under Increased External Pressures

Written by Felix Bailer, Kris Lui, and Erin Dowd, Vertiv

With governments around the world mandating employees quarantine at home, companies have launched the largest remote workforce enablement experiment in the world. The move is driven equally by a desire to maintain business continuity, protect workers, and proactively address regional requirements that are changing every day. For some companies the move has been relatively seamless, due to their dispersed, digital workforce, while for others it has been a trial by fire, as they seek to enable workers rapidly and protect staff whose roles demand a continued physical presence. Vertiv began the remote workforce enablement journey in 2018. In an interview, human resources (HR) leaders Felix Bailer, Erin Dowd, and Kris Lui shared insights and best practices from this journey, which accelerated dramatically in 2020 due to the global pandemic. Bailer shares that Vertiv’s journey wasn’t driven only by business continuity motivations in 2018, but the desire to provide a better work-life experience that would create business flexibility, drive employee productivity, and help retain workers in a competitive industry. Informally, workers within Global Business Services (GBS) were given the option to work from home one to four days a month in all geographies and functions, while those whose jobs required an on-site presence were allowed stagger shifts to better meet their personal needs. That experience came in handy when the market situation required Lui to accelerate the pace in Vertiv’s Asia-Pacific region in February. The following are lessons learned that could help in your own remote workforce enablement efforts.

Get Business Input on Remote Working

If your company is going remote for the first time or is scaling a remote workforce initiative, Dowd recommends getting cross-functional input, even if it is done at speed. At Vertiv, HR business partners led this effort, conducting workshops, surveys, and business need reviews. Key factors to consider are business and customer requirements, key roles, the nature of work to be performed, regional cultures and processes, digital tools required, business continuity, security, and more.

Move Swiftly Amidst Changing Conditions

Vertiv had piloted working from home in the company’s Manilla office, but the global health crisis struck before the model was deployed more fully in the region. Lui’s Asia-Pacific HR team members led the effort to introduce employees to remote working, starting in the north Asia sub-region during the Chinese New Year. Her team’s work involved monitoring governmental mandates, locating staff, making sure they were safe, ensuring they had the needed technology, and determining if facilities had robust sanitation equipment and procedures. After getting government’s approval, the team also needed to get staff ready for a phased return to work. Fortunately, Vertiv was deemed an essential business around the globe, including in the China, India and North American markets. After about a month working remotely, 99 percent of staff in China have been able to return to the office but are still wearing masks and using multiple sanitation procedures to keep the work environment safe for colleagues. To restart operations, a business continuity team, including the north Asia sub-regional president and cross-functional leaders, met every day to plan mission-critical work.

Communicate to Employees with Empathy

With recent events, change has been enormous. New developments have unfolded daily, forcing companies and workers to adapt. Vertiv leadership communicated early and often, to ensure that team members knew leaders

were concerned about their safety and well-being. Lui said leaders were empathetic and transparent about process changes. They worked hard to unify teams and refocus them on the work that needed to be done. “Stay calm. Don’t panic,” Lui said. “When you take care of your people, your people take care of the business. Show that you care about employees and how you can work together to serve customers.”

Develop an Employee Value Proposition

Remote workforce enablement may be driven by crisis now, but is an important tool to help attract, develop, and retain employees for the long term. Vertiv views working from home as an important recruitment and retention tool. According to Bailer, when the option rolled out in the Manila region, productivity soared by 15 percent and attrition dropped by a third.

Consider Personas as You Enable Workers

Creating personas for employee groups can help speed enablement, as groups are equipped with representative tools and service. Common personas are executives (who typically have different needs that require enhanced visibility and accessibility in a remote environment), road warriors (who are now home-based), IT staff (who need secure access to key systems and applications), and customer-facing support staff, among others.

Remote Workforce Enablement Toolkit

Standardizing enablement processes, such as onboarding, technology packages, and services can help speed enablement. Virtualized desktops enable one-to-many deployment that save IT teams time and effort. To move fast, Vertiv let staff take their equipment home and accelerated its collaborative software deployment plan to equip everyone with the same productivity tools.

Evolve Your Talent Model

Many companies have adopted cloud services, such as online backup, disaster recovery, and desktop as a service (DaaS) to create business continuity. Take the same approach with your staff. At Vertiv, nearly every member of the Global Business Services (GBS) team has a backup who is cross trained on his or her role. Employees are provided with different rotational assignments. And when a leader departs, the company aims to recruit from within. This practice strengthens business continuity a number of ways, while also increasing staff morale and motivation. “We have moved from buying talent to developing talent,” Bailer says.

Consider Change Management

Any major change to work practices will have its share of resisters. That may include your management team, which is accustomed to face-to-face contact with staff and customers. Develop a full-fledged change management and communications plan that considers the why, what, and how of remote work. Share new processes, controls, and desired outcomes; and report back on how incidents are resolved or how processes are improved. Vertiv’s GBS uses a communication and collaboration platform to link mid-level managers and internal customers for brainstorming, creating daily priorities, sharing a daily scorecard for IT, and reporting back. Leaders feel heard — and get to see how work continues at pace — increasing buy-in.

Plan for Disruption

As workers adopt new tools and practices, there will be challenges. Managers, IT staff, and savvy team members can help solve technology issues. Create new tip sheets; share security best practices; increase service desk staff and hours; and communicate when issues, such as connectivity challenges, will be resolved.

Treat Workers Equally

Most companies have staff who have presence-based roles, such as manufacturing line workers and managers, physical security teams, and delivery staff, who can’t be virtualized. Create a one-company value proposition by caring about their safety and communicating what you are doing to protect all workers. Consider deep-cleaning facilities and vehicles, providing staggered or additional shifts, spacing staff out on production lines, monitoring temperatures, providing generous sick leave, and erring on the side of caution. In Singapore, Vertiv alternated work days with an A and B team of similar roles, having one group working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the other working Tuesday and Thursday to decrease the number of workers on site. This created backup, ensuring business continuity in the event anyone on the team were to get infected.

Consider the Whole Person

Employees are having a challenging time balancing work and family. Conference calls with children’s voices and dogs barking are a part of the new normal. Show grace as staff are adjusting. Vertiv managers are checking in through one-on-one meetings with team members and sometimes wearing silly costumes on video conferences to help break the tension. Other companies have set up virtual coffee and cocktail hours to build camaraderie. “People are very tense right now, so infuse some humor into your communication to keep work fun and help reduce stress levels,” Lui advised.

Provide Flexibility

At some point in the future when the crisis abates, companies will need to revisit remote workforce enablement. New processes will be well-established, but it’s likely that employees will have a variety of wishes, which will need to be aligned against business needs. At Vertiv, we expect that our staff will likely choose to balance on-premise and remote work, as 63 percent have recently indicated they don’t want to work from home on a full-time basis. One of our basic needs as human beings is to be socially connected to others for a sense of belonging. When we re-imagine the future of work, we’ll need to balance between achieving business results through a remote workforce and maintaining a culture of connectivity and inclusion. “The point of this year is to rethink how we support workers,” Bailer says. “It’s not just about IT. It’s about creating the whole ecosystem of remote enablement. Companies should have built-in flexibility as mass remote working may become a long-term model.” Dowd agreed. “Some of the work we are doing now may not return to normal. There has been a paradigm shift in which work is no longer a place, but rather a way of being. It is something we do regardless of our location. In part, our job will be to ensure employees continue to embrace this concept and maintain the level of interaction and responsiveness that the company requires.” My last important point is that when we teach people to work from home, it is about “work” not a place. Helping employees to get into the mindset that customers and other employees require interaction, they deserve responsiveness and serviceability; we strive to help employees adapt to the concept that “work is what I do, not where I am”.

Five Networking Keys to Successful Working From Home

Written by Jacob Chacko, Regional Business Head – Middle East, Saudi & South Africa (MESA) at HPE Aruba

The current crisis has put a spotlight on a tried-and-true networking paradigm: Working from home. But despite the typical bandwagon claims, it turns out that effective remote or teleworker connectivity solutions have their own unique set of requirements that can only be satisfied with a broad range of products and services drawn from remote, branch and campus networking solutions delivering secure access to IT resources from the edge to the data centre to the cloud. Based on Aruba’s extensive experience in enabling remote and home office networking, there are five key components of an effective and productive work-fromhome solution that highlight the differences between consumer and enterprise-grade solutions. Ease of Connectivity: As employees make the sudden shift to working from home, it’s not just about somehow connecting to corporate resources, but how easy it is to do that. Depending on circumstances, a secure software client may be best for a personal device, for others, new hardware. But, no one wants to “read the manual” to set up their access, so automated zero- touch installation is a must. Performance: Once connected, employees will expect the same level of performance and responsiveness as they enjoy in the office. That typically means more than the consumer-grade connectivity solutions that workers deploy for their home use. Enterprise-grade hardware and software means that the in-home work experience will be the same as in the office. Reliability: This is the companion point to performance. Enterprise-grade access solutions are built for long-life with enhanced components and extended testing and have anticipated challenges such as interference in their design. It all adds up to five 9’s of uptime that employees have come to expect. Security: Security is more important than ever given the obvious lack of physical control in a home or remote environment. In-depth zero trust security includes multiple factor authentication, VPN encryption and traffic segmentation and consistent, role-based IT access policies that are applied consistently to a user or device no matter how and where they are connected. Management: Work from home cannot mean “you’re on your own” when a problem shows up. IT needs the same visibility into the remote access network as they have on the corporate campus. It starts with a centralized cloud management solution that tracks, monitors and ultimately either self-heals or facilitates rapid problem resolution, and includes application testing and network health monitoring from a client perspective.

5 Tips on How CISOs Can Cope with the Pandemic

Risk management and monitoring across the extended and remote enterprise may prove to be beneficial, as Adam Palmer, Chief Cybersecurity Strategist from Tenable, lists five best practices that CISOs can follow

The pandemic has changed the world, perhaps forever. Employees are working at home using personal, and often unsecured, devices and networks. For a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), used to believing that for the corporate network perimeter “inside is safe, outside is unsafe,” now nearly everything is outside and there is no perimeter. New risks and vulnerabilities seem to be arising everywhere on many new types of devices. The threat landscape has expanded — a worrying position for any security leader. Below are five ways that CISOs can do this successfully – reduce risk based on sound advice and progress through a systematic checklist:

#1 If everything is important, then nothing is important

During a crisis, resources are short and everyone is overloaded with demands. Everything can feel like a priority. For the CISO, the first task is to identify what is only innocent smoke from what is actually a fire. By combining tools like threat intelligence, vulnerability research, and probability risk, CISOs can begin to prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities that are now distributed across the expanded enterprise perimeter. Prioritization focuses resources to the right area, in the right amount, and in the right sequence.

#2 Avoid box ticking exercises

In these complex times, CISOs cannot afford to use a generic checklist to scan their extended network, which has now changed beyond earlier recognition. Work at home has meant that employees are now connecting to the network using whatever device is at hand that gets the task done — whether it’s to participate or host a video call; instant chat message with a colleague; access a cloud application; or any other daily task. In short, convenience has overtaken risk as workers struggle to deliver from home. For the CISO in this environment, a risk-based management approach that focuses on actual risks being exploited, not generic lists of potential risks, is most effective. This also avoids overrun of the operating expense (Opex) budget.

#3 You cannot protect what is unknown

One of the biggest challenges for a CISO today is visibility into what is happening in their remote work environment. The organization’s workers may have had to relo- cate from their normal home, or even their geo-location. Staff are connecting from multiple private and public networks, using multiple known and unknown devices, and at predictable but also unpredict- able hours. The CISO needs to understand this activity pattern is now the new normal. To gain complete visibility of the extended enterprise network, CISOs should utilise authenticated agent scans that register and profile all assets being used. This will help the CISO build a unified and complete list of the vulnerabilities that have been created by distributed and remote work at home practices.

#4 The Board wants risk details

The Board of Directors will want to know what risks the organization is exposed to, and what is being done to reduce/address them. By adopting a risk-based approach, CISOs can accurately assess, quantifiably, the level of risk exposure in terms that the Board can understand. Using a risk-based approach, the CISO can profile the distributed risk across the extended enterprise on the basis of large-scale assets, geolocation, business units, and device groups, etc. The Board will be able to evaluate the business impact if any mission-critical areas are exposed compared to the cost to implement controls that reduce the risk.

#5 The trap of instant gratification

In this time of crisis, and under pressure from management to deliver security, CISOs might be tempted to purchase additional tools, hoping that a single purchase order may be the key to alleviate the overall risk levels of the or- ganization to deliver quick results. Unfortunately, a magic bullet sim- ply does not exist. What is more meaningful is to better understand the risk environment and system- atically demonstrate reduction of risks based on the prioritization of vulnerabilities. CISOs could also consider using managed service providers to reduce their day-today overheads of monitoring risks and vulnerabilities. They can also consider bringing in professional services to boost the skills capability of their internal teams to use existing tools and be more effective.