As the coronavirus pandemic has taken hold, everyone on the planet has been affected in one way or another. For much of the world, social distancing and lockdown measures have meant that they have been unable to go into work. This has meant that businesses have needed to adapt.

For many companies, the new norm has meant that employees now work from home. But there are still companies that are grappling with how they do this. For some businesses, it seems like the way to go in the longterm, and many are considering ditching the office space and managing their teams remotely.

While remote working can be very productive, and if managed well, can bring out the best in your team, it does come with its hurdles. These include communication challenges, security concerns, and issues collaborating.

In this article, we’ll identify the challenges that surround working from home, and talk about how you can overcome them.

Managing Your Cybersecurity Risks

One of the biggest hurdles you will have to overcome will be cybersecurity. With more attacks taking place than ever, hackers are using the current crisis and the fact that people are working from home.

Something that you can do if you haven’t already done so is to hire a managed IT services provider to take care of your online security. A managed service provider will carry out thorough inspections of your systems to minimize the risk of attack as well as reducing the downtime of your business due to IT problems. In addition to this, they will provide round-the-clock support and monitoring to improve overall productivity, and help you create a disaster recovery plan. You can read more about this here.

Setting up a virtual private network (VPN) will be essential for any employee working from home. With home internet connections being particularly weak in terms of security, using a virtual private network will allow you to get online with an extra layer of protection so visit a site like AlwaysVPN to find reviews on all the major VPN providers.

Improving Communication

Communication is going to be a major issue when your workforce is completely spread out. While you may have phones and emails to keep in touch, messages can get misunderstood.

Have meetings using software such as Zoom. The more often you can host meetings, the better it will be for your team.

In addition to this, set up a team Slack channel. This is a great tool for collaborative working. It is immediate and allows for creative communications.

Collaborating Effectively

In addition to tools such as Slack, think about how you can streamline your work to make it easier for each other.

Ome of the most effective tools that you can use that will help with this is cloud-based systems.

Cloud-based systems allow several people to work on one document from different places.

You’ll all see the changes as they are made, and as such you’ll save yourselves time and feel as though you’re working together.

By using any cloud-based systems you will also be enhancing your security too. Because the data is stored off-site in the cloud it cannot get accidentally overwritten or become corrupted.