Enabling Your Remote Workforce to Succeed: A Complete Guide

The idea of a remote workforce has gone from being a novelty or temporary solution to what some would call a full-scale revolution. Recent Gallup data found that 26% of today’s employees work completely remote, while 52% work hybrid positions. 

Enabling a remote workforce to thrive requires the right IT infrastructure, asset procurement and deployment, tech stack building, and more — all of which we’ll cover below. 

Essential Technology Infrastructure for Remote Work

A critical precursor to everything else is building a solid IT foundation that allows remote employees to perform their jobs successfully, regardless of their remote location. There are three main components for this.

One is providing distributed teams with the right IT hardware, which can include computers, laptops, mobile devices, accessories, peripherals, and virtual desktop infrastructure based on their unique role and geography. 

The second is giving remote users optimal software and apps, while paying close attention to data security and industry standard compliance. 

Ideally, these will be pre-configured for each remote employee before being shipped so they can onboard quickly and efficiently without having to worry about installation. 

The third involves creating a seamless cloud computing infrastructure so that remote workers can access your company's network securely and reliably, whatever their location may be. 

To accomplish this, your remote work environment must offer adequate bandwidth, use standardized operating systems and apps, feature strong network security, and have minimal system downtime.

Note that building a winning tech infrastructure is an endlessly iterative process and will likely require ongoing trial and error to get it firing on all cylinders. However, when the core foundation is in place, your team should be in a position to thrive. 

IT Equipment Procurement and Deployment for Remote Employees

Finding, purchasing, and shipping IT assets to remote workers is another essential part of the process. There are a few key steps involved with this.

• Researching vendors
• Identifying the optimal vendors and IT equipment for your remote employees
• Negotiating contracts
• Initiating purchase orders
• Pre-configuring devices for streamlined IT onboarding for your remote team
• Tracking orders
• Receiving and inspecting equipment

Because of the inherent logistical complexities involved here, many organizations prefer to partner with a professional third-party that offers IT procurement services.

allwhere, for instance, offers seamless global procurement to accommodate the needs of your worldwide team, and takes care of local sourcing, cross-border procurement, customs, and compliance.

We handle end-to-end communication and logistics with vendors and remote workers, and let you easily track all activities from a centralized dashboard so you always know the status of IT equipment. 

And because we don’t rely on just one supplier and instead partner with an extensive network of vendors, we’re able to quickly and securely procure the specific equipment you want without being limited to one vendor’s inventory. 

So if one vendor doesn’t have what you’re looking for, you can simply use an alternative. 

If you’re looking for hassle-free IT equipment procurement and deployment and a truly hands-off experience, allwhere can be a great choice. 

Collaboration Tools and Communication Platforms

Unlike an in-house office space setting, where collaboration and communication are done face-to-face, remote team members need the perfect mix of platforms that offer the same level of employee engagement, only digitally. 

Implementing the optimal setup should allow for seamless engagement and productivity without skipping a beat and provide a satisfying remote worker experience from start to finish. 

Some examples of collaboration tools for remote teams include video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and Instant messengers like Slack and Google Chat. 

As for communication tools, some examples are project management platforms like Trello and Asana, file sharing tools like Google Workspace, and document collaboration tools like Google Docs and Notion.

The key to effective communication and collaboration for remote teams is selecting platforms that are reliable with next to no downtime, that have a minimal learning curve, and offer robust integrations that connect with your existing IT ecosystem. 

Besides that, security should always be a top priority, which brings us to our next point.

Secure Remote Access and Network Security

Any time you’re dealing with remote communication at scale, security is a major concern. Given that 2024 saw a record number of data breach notices, totaling over 1.3 billion, and was up 211% from 2023, creating a secure remote workforce has never been more important. 

To combat the ever-increasing threat of security breaches, it’s essential to fortify your network and leverage cutting-edge technology that covers all the angles. 

A good starting point is to be strict with network access settings when configuring devices for remote workers. Ideally, access will be kept to a bare minimum so each remote worker can use the essential platforms they need without any additional access that could be a security threat. 

We’re personally fans of zero-trust access solutions that only allow authenticated users who are on compliant devices to access your organization’s internal resources, as this can go a long way in setting proactive security standards. 

Next, use a virtual private network (VPN) to create a secure, fully encrypted connection to allow remote workers to use your company network via public internet safely and securely. 

Multi-factor authentication is also a must, where remote workers are required to verify their identity with at least two different methods before gaining access to your network. 

Also, be sure to automate software updates and security upgrades through notifications to ensure every remote device is up-to-date at all times. Not only will this enhance security, it’s also important for optimizing productivity and overall network performance.

Remote Asset Management and Device Tracking

Even for a relatively small remote workforce with team members scattered across different countries, IT asset management can be overwhelming. 

And for those with dozens or hundreds of employees all over the world — each with multiple devices — logistics headaches are almost inevitable. 

That’s why you need a rock-solid strategy for handling remote asset management and device tracking every step of the way. From initial ordering to employee shipping to storage to retrieval, you need to know where every single device is at all times with no question marks.

While it’s certainly possible to handle this in-house, most organizations, especially those with larger IT networks, are usually better off using remote asset management services. 

With a platform like allwhere, for example, you can easily track all of your IT assets from one convenient platform, so you have a crystal clear snapshot of who has what, when a device is in transit, and when it’s in storage for complete transparency. 

And for equipment that’s in transit, you can monitor the status via consistent updates until it reaches its intended destination for maximum peace of mind. 

Building an Effective Remote Work Policy

The processes you use for procuring, deploying, and managing IT equipment are a big part of building a successful remote workforce. But it doesn’t stop there. 

Another critical component is creating a cohesive framework to keep all of your remote workers on the same page — something that can usually be accomplished with a well-fleshed-out remote work policy. 

Given there’s a certain degree of flexibility baked into remote working and hybrid work, you’ll want your policy to be flexible as well. With that said, here are some potential areas to cover. 

• Working hours
• Check-in frequency
• Hours of availability 
• Device usage guidelines
• Data security protocol
• Remote access limitations
• Communication tools (virtual meetings, email, messenger, etc.)
• Policy violation consequences

Keep in mind that your policy will inevitably change over time, so you’ll need to make ongoing revisions to keep it up-to-date. Also, it’s smart to ask for feedback from your remote workers, so you’ll know how to correct common friction points and boost employee satisfaction.

Employee Engagement and Productivity in Remote Environments

Whenever employees are working independently as part of remote teams, engagement and productivity are always a big concern. And there are conflicting remote work statistics on whether productivity increases or decreases in this environment. 

For example, research from Great Place to Work found that more than 800,000 employees who transitioned to remote work experienced increased productivity. 

However, Stanford University found that “fully remote work is associated with about 10% lower productivity than in-person work.”

Whatever the true impact, it’s important to have a strategy in place to raise engagement and productivity. Here are some ideas for doing so.

• Set clear, quantifiable productivity goals for those working in a home office.
• Assign each employee a mentor to routinely check in on their progress and answer questions.
• Host periodic virtual team events to build a sense of rapport and workplace community.
• Use informal communication channels like Slack or social media, where remote workers. can socialize digitally to get to know each other on a more personal level outside of regular remote collaboration.
• Strive to create a healthy work life balance to minimize fatigue and burnout.

Also, be quick to congratulate remote workers for a job well done and celebrate productivity milestones, as this can promote sustained momentum. 

IT Support for Troubleshooting for Distributed Teams

Any time there’s a remote work arrangement, IT issues will inevitably arise. Some will be minor and can be taken care of with a quick fix. Others may be more major and require IT experts to step in or have an employee ship their device to a dedicated IT professional to resolve. 

Whatever the situation, you should plan for issues that could potentially happen and have a streamlined framework to ensure fast resolutions. 

This typically starts with taking control of your IT network, where you use a database to keep tabs on when updates and upgrades need to be made on each device. 

Proactive maintenance like this should keep your network running more efficiently and prevent many issues from arising in the first place. 

Next, provide remote workers with a dedicated online self-search resource where they can enter FAQs and find answers for basic problems.  

You may also want to leverage AI tools, such as AI user support, to handle simple problems so your workers can get 24/7 service regardless of their location. 

Finally, you’ll likely want to implement remote device management, which allows your tech experts to fix many issues remotely for fast resolution with no travel. Besides that, they can configure devices remotely, monitor security, see when devices need to be upgraded, and more. 

Measuring Remote Workforce Success and Performance

The last piece of the puzzle is gaining a big-picture understanding of how well your remote workers are performing, the areas they’re excelling in, and the weaknesses that could use improvement.  

Once you have an objective view of all this, you should know which areas to target. 

To accomplish this, you’ll want to use remote work analytics and specifically assess the following areas.

• Project completion rates
• Average task completion time
• Percentage of milestones that are successfully reached
• Revenue per employee
• Employee satisfaction rate and engagement score
• Worker retention rate
• Customer satisfaction
• Technology utilization ratio

For more information on how to effectively measure remote workplace success and performance, we recommend checking out Global Workplace Analytics. 

Here, you’ll find resources on how to optimize the remote work experience, how to assess your company culture, e-learning tools for distributed work, and much more. 

Conclusion

Whether your workforce is hybrid or entirely remote, it’s important that you cover all the bases for effectively managing your team from top to bottom. 

This article should serve as a blueprint to ensure you’re equipped to manage device procurement and deployment, team collaboration, security, productivity, troubleshooting, and anything else that may come your way.