Seven Key Ingredients for Work From Home Success

Necessity is the mother of invention. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s about how adaptable we humans can be. In just a few short months, a massive swath of the American working public has shifted to working from home full time.

This quick shift has come with a large number of bumps in the road. Unfortunately, people and companies are still struggling to find the right technical solutions to help them work from home. We have all been on a Teams or Zoom call where the video quality is horrible, the connection is breaking up, or there is an endless echo coming from who knows where.

It can be difficult to establish a quality standard among employees that might have a broad range of equipment available to them. At Protek, we created this handy checklist of the essential hardware to help your employees have a quality work from home experience.

Here are the seven key ingredients of work from home success:

1. Corporate owned desktop or laptop

In the early days of the pandemic, many employees just needed basic secure remote access to their desktop PC back at the office. At the time, hardware was extremely hard to come by, and many people had to make do with what they already had at home.

While it is possible to create a secure remote desktop connection from a home or personal machine, it is not ideal as a long term solution. Protek recommends that organizations invest in company owned PCs or laptops for all staff that work permanently or frequently from their their homes. Corporate owned machines are easier to secure, easier to manage, and give a professional and high-quality experience to your staff. Whether you invest in a desktop or laptop form factor, a corporate owned machine allows you to have standards for the software image, clear and effective policies for permissible use, and a guarantee that you can deliver your staff a high-quality and productive work from home experience.

2. Excellent Wi-Fi Access

With video-conferencing becoming the standard for business communication, work from home employees need high quality Wi-Fi throughout the home. Most households lack structured cabling or Ethernet jacks for a stable, wired network in the home.

When one or two parents are working, kids are remote learning, or video gaming and streaming video bandwidth can be scarce on the home Wi-Fi. That’s why most homes, large or small, need a Wi-Fi network that leverages mesh technology to get a stable signal to all corners of the home, especially to those quiet places where folks are working. The network needs to be spread throughout the home and the users – whether lightweight or bandwidth hogs – need to be balanced out on different Wi-Fi segments.

Protek recommends Wi-Fi mesh solutions like the Eero system, which connects a Wi-Fi router base station router to the home high-speed Internet connection and then can easily be expanded with Wi-Fi access points in a mesh configuration. The mesh access points can be set up in minutes and strategically placed throughout the home. The system is also easily expandable with additional mesh access points as a household’s needs evolve.

3. Dual Monitors

Dual monitors are often overlooked as a productivity enhancing investment. While multiple monitors used to be a luxury, the price of monitors have fallen to such a degree that they should be a feature of any serious home office setup. While there are genuine criticisms of multi-tasking as a drag on productivity, many computing functions require lots of screen real estate, multiple windows and tabs, and interactions between multiple applications, which are all enhanced with a dual monitor setup.

4. Quality USB headset

With audio inputs, there are a lot of choices. While some appreciate the convenience of wireless connections via Bluetooth, for the most stable and effective audio input for the widest range of applications, we recommend a high quality, wired USB headset. A wired headset will have rock-solid stability and you won’t find yourself fumbling with Bluetooth settings before that important call. Audio quality is the most important component of any call, whether it is a video or an audio call; audio has to be crystal clear and error free.

5. High-definition USB Camera

Webcams have vastly improved over the years. When you spend nearly your whole day on Teams or Zoom, it pays to look your best. The latest generation of webcams feature up to 4K high-definition cameras and automatic low-lighting settings. All of these features are essential to provide a life-like and high-quality video experience. When your team is using video calls and conference calling for sales, customer service, and external collaboration, it pays to invest in quality video cameras for your team.

6. Surge Protector

Today’s teleworker setup needs protection from power surges that can permanently damage computers, networking gear, and other equipment. Power surges can be caused by lightning strikes, faulty wiring, or surges from the resumption of power after a blackout. With today’s large work from home population, not only should businesses want to protect company assets in use at employees homes, but it is now more important than ever to think about business continuity for teleworkers. A surge protector is an affordable and easy to use device that will protect your employee’s corporate issued computer and other essential gear from destruction and the potential downtime after a power surge event.

7. Professional Configuration and Management

Just like a computer you would deploy at your office, your work from home setup should be configured by a professional. Each company has specific applications, management tools, antivirus and more that need to be installed and configured before the machine is completely ready to “plug and play”. After the device is configured properly it is ready to be deployed and can be utilized right out of the box to connect to the corporate network.

Fortunately, Protek has gone the extra mile and packaged everything you need in a convenient and easy-to-buy solution. Check out the Protek Work From Home Bundle, which has everything you need. Ask Michelle Lawson for a consultation on this offering today.