With all the articles related to working remotely coming out recently, I’ve found that these two companies, Platte River Networks and pwc, have the very best recommendations related to successfully creating a remote workplace. I’ve shared both of them below.
However, there is one glaring issue related to the adoption of these best practices that, if not addressed, will mean that NO lasting change occurs within your company. Watch this 3 minute video on how to avoid this major pitfall!
Here are Platte River Networks tips for Working from Home
Platte River Networks provides full service technology consulting to businesses. They are considered one of the top Managed Service Providers in the world according to Vangard and have received 25 awards between 2017 and 2019 for the services they provide and the happiness and satisfaction of their team members. They manage companies up to several hundred people.
I sold my Managed Services business, Allen Technology Advising, to Platte River Networks in 2018. So they have a special place in my heart.
They are a 50 person company that helps businesses address the challenges of remote access to networks. They also successfully just moved their entire workforce home without any adverse impact to their clients.
Here is the pwc Remote Productivity article
I worked at Price Waterhouse in the late 90s and privately pioneered remote access 😉
Here is how I pulled that off. I worked out of the Denver office but was part of a 10 person elite technology swat team scattered across the nation. We ran technology projects for the top 20 Audit Business Unit clients, including Pepsi, NCR, United Bank of Switzerland and Disney. In my spare time I managed the Denver Office Network. This is where I secretly reprogrammed the phone switch to send all my work calls to my home phone in Evergreen, Colorado so that my comrades around the nation thought I was in the office. While I did eventually get busted by my boss, Cindy Cole in Atlanta, I still got promoted to a Business Technology Liaison shortly thereafter. That role made me the Chief Information Officer for the 35,000 person audit business unit (at age 27) reporting to the CIO of the 67K person worldwide firm. They also let me continue to work from home because I was managed on results, not on how much time I was in the office (smart move, regardless of where you are working).
Price Waterhouse literally wrote the book on remote access in 1996. The one item that stands out is that they believed that remote workers should go to the office one day a week for social reasons. That makes all sorts of sense.
