Improve Employee Productivity With Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Do your employees have the access they need to work productively from home?

For some employees, working productively at home is second-nature. For others, it is a new world to navigate. The COVID-19 pandemic has made remote work a necessity for all, regardless of comfort level.

As an IT professional, you’ve seen these employee challenges firsthand. You’ve likely moved quickly to get users online and operational in their home environments. We’ve seen our clients’ challenges in enabling this fast access too, and last week hosted a webinar to discuss our immediate recommendations to solve these desktop and application access challenges. Read on for a recap of this webinar discussion, or click the link to watch.

We believe the technology requirements for a productive work-from-home environment are straightforward, as follows:

• Proper access to applications and data

• Ability to generate and distribute necessary information

• Effectively communicate with customers, colleagues & vendors: collaboration tools including phone, video, messaging, chat

• Tools allowing for application, data, information, collaboration

Barriers to Enabling a Productive Workforce

Barriers to enabling productive work-from-home employees fall into two primary categories: internal and external. Make sure you are well-aware of these challenges. Empathizing with and understanding employees will improve your ability to leverage technology as a solution.

External Barriers

““We’re being forced into the world’s largest work-from-home experiment, and it hasn’t been easy for a lot of organizations to implement.” ”

— Saikat Chatterjee, Senior Director, Advisory at Gartner

• Tools: Inadequate, or complete lack of tools to perform work properly. For many employees, the work-from-home environment means a new, limited, or nonexistent toolset.

• Poor Performance: A work-from-home culture is likely to result in a more hands-off management approach. For some employees this lack of detailed oversight and direction can be challenging, resulting in time management and prioritization gaps.

• Multitasking: The combination of remote work and stay-home orders requires many employees to balance work and personal tasks simultaneously. Household and childcare requirements may need to occur during traditional 9 to 5 hours. This is a true test of prioritization and time management skills for many workers.

Internal Barriers

• Lack of communication: Remote workers must be intentional in their efforts to communicate regularly with colleagues. If they are not, it becomes all to easy for days to pass without regular voice or video contact. This creates lack of insight to employee productivity and progress towards goals.

• Feelings of detachment: The work-from-home schedule can be isolating for some employees, and lack of regular communication can lead to larger detachment issues. This can result in motivation, productivity, and retention problems.

• Drastic change in schedule or responsibilities: For some employees, former work tasks may be impossible or unnecessary to accomplish in a work-from-home setting. Re-purposing their time can lead to new challenges like lack of ability for management oversight, remote training needs, and difficulty in gauging aptitude for new skills.

Work From Home Technology Options

There are three ways to enable desktop and application access for work-from-home employees. Read on for a summary of these methods and our recommendations on potential technologies to implements.

1. Corporate Laptops / PCs

   Perhaps the most straight-forward option: allow your users to take their current business-owned devices home with them. This enables the user to a) work on a familiar device with no training necessary and b) enables them to work offline as needed. This solution is typically very cost-effective, with minimal capital spend required. However, it does require some supporting technology to allow access back to the corporate network. One solution is VPN. Check out our blog last week on VPN bandwidth and scaling.

2. Remoting

   Perhaps you have users that must work on a personal device; shipping or bringing a business-owned device home is not an option. In these cases, remoting may be your best option. With this model, you can access their existing device from home. The top market solutions for this are Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Citrix Cloud Control Plane + Remote PC Access, and VMware Horizon View. For more details on these options and the pros/cons, listen to our webinar recording above.

3. Virtualization

   With virtualization, you can give your users a virtual desktop: either on-premises or in the cloud. Citrix, for example, offers a cloud-based control plane for rapid start-up for new customers. With VMware Horizon View, you can leverage your existing VMware administrator knowledge. Microsoft offers a couple options: Remote Desktop Services and Windows Virtual Desktop. We dive into the details in our YouTube recording.

Improve Productivity with Technology that Works

Enabling remote desktop access is important, but it’s only one piece of a productive work-from-home environment. Supporting technologies like collaboration, voice, video, and SaaS applications round out a productive and engaging remote workforce IT strategy. Burwood can help you make decisions that reap immediate and long-term benefits. Reach out to our team for one-on-one conversations about your environment, and listen to our webinar on this topic for an in-depth discussion.

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May 20, 2020