The culling of the daily commute is one of the most recognised benefits of remote work. However, if workers no longer need to travel to their workspaces, their workspace needs to travel to them.
This creates two efficiency problems for you:
- The efficiency of your hiring or IT team – you need them to organise the distribution of laptops and other work equipment to new hires as efficiently as possible.
- The efficiency of delivery – the sooner your new hire’s laptop reaches them, the sooner they can get to work. Any lag time costs you in productivity loss.
Here are four tips for maximising the efficiency of your equipment distribution process.
Prioritise pre-start date delivery
If your new hire doesn’t receive their laptop in time for day one, they can’t get to work. It’s as simple as that. Every hour, or day, of delay costs you in productivity loss.
Ensuring a laptop arrives in time is not always straightforward – especially in the case of immediate starters in hard-to-access regions. Sending equipment to unfamiliar regions often means navigating complicated and costly local customs requirements, which can delay arrival times by weeks.
My two pieces of advice:
- Always check lead times – if there’s a cost difference, offset against the productivity loss of a slower service.
- Work with a global equipment provider that can manage the delivery logistics wherever you hire to save considerable time and risk.
Set up devices before deployment
In short, don’t let your employees set up their own devices. It’s inefficient and time consuming – the time spent downloading apps, creating user accounts, installing security measures etc. could be better spent on meeting new colleagues, or getting on with work.
There is also an increased security risk. There is the immediate concern that security measures could be installed incorrectly, and remote workers often work from insecure networks, such as home broadbands or public WiFis, which increases the likelihood of a cyber attack.
Aside from the inconvenience of a data breach, the financial costs can be huge; the average cost of a single data breach is US$4.35M. Ensuring your devices are properly configured, with user accounts, software applications, security measures etc., before deployment is a minor investment by comparison.
Enrol devices into a remote device management solution
If any of your team members work remotely, you need to be able to manage their devices remotely to optimise productivity and security.
A Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution allows you to remotely monitor devices, apply security policies and more. You can also install updates remotely to ensure peak performance of your devices. This is far more efficient than nudging your employees to update devices themselves.
Enrol your devices into an MDM pre-deployment to maintain control from day one.
Offer round-the-clock IT support
Once you’ve successfully onboarded your new hires, you then need to think about maintaining their productivity as efficiently as you can.
A broken or slow laptop means downtime. Imagine one of your senior software engineers is out-of-action for a few hours – every minute costs you. The sooner you can resolve equipment issues, the less money you’ll throw down the drain on productivity loss.
IT support is essential. If your teams are distributed, it’s critical that your support runs round-the-clock. If an employee in Sydney has to wait a whole working day for the London-based support team to come online, you’ve lost a day of productive work before the troubleshooting begins.
Solution
To set up your remote teams as efficiently as possible, you need both efficient organisation and efficient logistics. Organising equipment distribution in-house is time-consuming, especially at scale, and takes your People and IT team away from the job they were hired to do.
Working with a global equipment provider is the simplest way to solve both efficiency problems.
