When telecommuting rhymes with a multitude of software

💡 : It is possible to listen to this article! Find the audio at the bottom of the page 🎧

How do you manage evolving behaviors in the workplace?

Recent years have marked the beginning of a profound shift in working habits.

We are seeing more and more job postings offering remote work positions, and candidates themselves are moving to the cities of their choice rather than to employment areas. We all aspire to a better quality of life. As a result, many companies have understood this and offer flexible offices that allow employees to split their working time between home and the office. Coworking spaces are springing up everywhere, and advice on integrating and uniting remote employees is becoming increasingly common.

Companies in full remote (complete telecommuting) appear to meet several challenges:

• The difficulty of recruiting. When there are no more physical premises, borders fall and candidates are easier to find.
• The impossibility of finding premises when working with employees from all over the world.
• Sometimes it's simply the high cost of real estate when you're a start-up launching and you only have a few employees.

As you may have gathered, some companies are very advanced in these areas, others are starting to think about them, and a large proportion are not ready at all.
So how do you manage the organization of this shift to remote work when you are in the IT or HR department?

In the event that the premises suddenly become inaccessible (fire, public transport strikes, pandemic, etc.), companies implement a business continuity plan: in an emergency, all known and accessible software is used to cope and stay in contact/effective without really being able to consult and reflect on the issues. This subsequently raises questions about the relevance of the choice, the redundancy of the tools and, above all, the allocation and use of these tools by users.

Even without reaching such an emergency situation, IT departments have often implemented a number of software solutions to facilitate remote work. The digitalization of companies frequently had 2020 as its ultimate goal, and here we are. The cloud is a given.

However, have the employees followed through?

We usually 'offer' welcome packages to new employees, and rightly so. However, a recent study shows that not everyone has the same needs or the same knowledge. For example, Microsoft 365 is not used by everyone, and even 44% of companies have underutilized and sometimes even unactivated licenses. Even in a traditional setting, IT departments do not receive feedback on this type of problem, but the phenomenon can be exacerbated when teleworking. People are hesitant to admit what they don't know how to do, and they no longer think about the software that was automatically installed but never opened.

It is therefore important to have a close relationship with managers in order to know the real needs of their teams in terms of software. This avoids disproportionate or misused resources. Training courses can also be set up with HR to improve the systematic allocation of certain software.

Train, educate and communicate

What are the preferred software for remote work, for keeping in touch, sharing progress, and holding meetings?

Slack and Teams overwhelmingly win the use of group and individual discussions in companies.

Other very popular software includes Zoom, Skype, Teams, and Whereby for videoconferencing; Google Workspace/Google Drive and Microsoft 365 for collaborative work; and many others like Loom (screen sharing), Organilog (intervention management), etc.

Without a clear message from management, especially in the event of a rapid shift to remote work, employees will likely take the initiative to use certain applications themselves, especially since several are used in the workplace, such as Zoom or Skype. They will think they are doing the right thing. Thus, the most popular applications for personal exchanges are WhatsApp, Messenger, Discord, Houseparty, Skype, Zoom, Instagram. What do all these applications have in common? They are free... Yes, but as the famous saying goes:

If it's free, you are the product

So data collection is also part of the deal!

Do you see the trouble coming? Yes, if the company has not specified which software to use or buy, the paid versions of professional applications, it is likely that the data is in danger.

It is therefore important to have a clear and responsive communication from management or IT departments to employees regarding best practices, including providing the official list of tools approved by the company and possibly a blacklist.
It is important to explain these choices; an employee will much more readily accept a ban or a request to use certain software if it is justified. Transparency and honesty avoid many pitfalls.

A software request from a team? Don't put that request in the 'we'll see someday' pile and discuss their motivations with that department.

The IT departments' reflection time is being put to the test. In general, long delays in the selection and implementation of certain tools are often criticized (everyone has their arguments), but today reflection time is no longer possible.
Society is evolving with unexpected events that change the game in a few days and with habits that are constantly changing. Competition, globalization, and digitalization mean that we can no longer wait quietly to implement a tool; we must be responsive. Customers expect everything, immediately, and employees (who are also consumers) expect the same speed from the company as they get in their daily lives. It is this responsiveness that is becoming the most important quality for a company.

But reactivity requires upstream organization, otherwise you get only vagueness and disorder.

What happens if a remote work plan hasn't been planned in advance? The collaborators will either:

• receive instructions on how to use tools previously set up by the company
• wait for the company to set up tools for people who did not have a telecommuting configuration before, if of course, the communication is made immediately and specifies NOT to do ANYTHING while waiting
• choose tools themselves to address their immediate need

It is clear that there is a significant risk of ending up with software and applications that are not controlled by the company.

What are the risks of having a plethora of software? You've seen this one coming slowly: shadow IT... The enemy of IT departments! How do you secure company data when you don't control where it's deployed?

How to control costs when they are scattered across unlisted licenses? One department took Slack and another Teams, one chose Salesforce and another SAP... They are similar, why not choose just one and better negotiate purchases?

(To learn more about shadow IT, visit our article; see the link above.)

So what do we do?

We anticipate for good responsiveness:

• We are implementing a pro-active listening approach to employee requests to avoid shadow IT throughout the year.
• We have an emergency telecommuting plan that is known to the 'crisis officers' (liaison person, influential) and can be implemented immediately.
• Above all, we have identity and access management tools throughout the year to manage the use and requests for software. This allows a 360 view of licenses and access in relation to the HR file.

Only a small handful of companies had planned for a sudden shift to remote work for the entire company. This is obviously a scenario that now needs to be addressed.

What are the advantages of implementing an IAM tool for telecommuting?

You might argue that remote work isn't for everyone? You are probably right for some people in your company, but mandatory remote work implementations have shown that a portion of the company could function very well. Not necessarily all week, but a few days.

A change in habits is to be expected in the coming years anyway. So how do we do it?

An identity management solution for HR

From an HR perspective, we are organizing agreements so that everyone finds their place. 68% of HR directors are opting for the development of remote work according to an ANDRH survey. Off the record, there is even talk of moving towards shared offices, flex-office.

HR partners with the IT department to promote best practices in security.

An identity management tool will allow them to have a good overview of internal and external employees (service providers, temporary staff, etc.). It will also allow them to create workflows, particularly in the case of onboarding.

An entitlement management solution for teams

From a team perspective, not all teams have the same maturity in terms of remote work. Some are, of course, faced with the impossibility of working remotely, but others sometimes need a good working method such as Agile or other well-integrated processes before being truly operational. Functional teams thus obtain very good results in remote work.

Thus, an employee may need to evolve or participate quickly in a new project and thus need new tools. Their manager can thus re-evaluate their access rights or assign them new software quickly and in accordance with the rules established by IT.

An access management solution for IT services

From an IT perspective, we usually find an on-premise infrastructure with people in the office and therefore software installed locally. Here, remote work signifies a change in these practices with more tools in SaaS, therefore in the cloud.

A tool accessible from everywhere, great! Yes, but... Yes, but how do you manage access and people? Telecommuting then requires controlled identity management to secure company data.

We don't wait for the problem, the sudden change in working methods, to centralize access. The implementation of IAM software is done upstream.

You immediately gain an overview of your applications, accounts, and users. You manage users and their accounts.

The deployment is done in several stages. We implement an access and identity management solution on certain pilot services, we see how it works, what needs to be improved, and what saves time. When everything is stable, we deploy massively.

On the other hand, one of the many advantages of using an IAM in teleworking is the extremely rapid implementation of new tools for immediate deployment if necessary.

IT departments, for their part, gain centralized account management. Users access all their applications remotely, and IT has access to all the applications used by employees, to licenses, to the level of responsibility...

It also allows for better sizing of employee needs and purchasing the right number of software licenses.

Another interesting aspect is the management of equipment in the case of teleworking. If you lend equipment to your employees, you will need to keep an up-to-date inventory of what you have provided, who is working on which version, etc. The advantage with an IAM is that you do not have to multiply the software and you can manage your access, your identities and your equipment on a single platform.

In addition, when deploying a pitching, it is essential to have good control of all of your hardware.

An access and identity management tool helps strengthen the security of data and remote connections. This will help with a review of the compliance of IT processes for remote work.

Remote work doesn't necessarily mean ease or absence of constraints. The digitalization of companies is one thing, securing practices is another. It is necessary for IT departments to have a complete knowledge of the software used in their companies, the number of active accounts, and authorization rights, and this becomes even more true with a remote work situation.

How do you manage access and identities in your company within a telecommuting context?