As we have seen the hastened move from office to remote work, making operations possible is at the top of every company’s mind. However, companies do not have ample enough time to respond.

Let us look at some statistics from Cyber-Readiness Report of Acronis.

• 47% of all global remote workers were not given adequate guidance from their IT department when switching to remote work
• 69% of remote workers have recently started using workspace collaboration tools, like Zoom and Webex
• Top challenges identified by remote workers: Using a VPN and inability to use internal networks & applications
• 92% of employees expect their companies to invest more in digital transformation tools to help adapt to new business realities

1.

It is surprising for us to find out that as much as 47% of remote workers received minimal and inadequate guidance from the IT department! A clear channel of communication should first be established within the company as everything is set into a spiral mode.

It appears that most employees were communicating via group chats via personal mobile phone device rather than e-mail in Singapore.

This experience has given many companies a glimpse of how capable their IT team is able to quickly respond. How did your company fare in this?

2.

This is not surprising. Many companies quickly seek to find a mean to conduct online group meeting and discussion rather than over just texts. There are various reasons for this but most importantly is to quickly sync up.

3.

Inability to use internal network and applications are a really common challenge as many companies are still using the intranet to store sensitive data and information. There is a fear of data leak if it was to be hosted online but also, VPN has not always been a requirement in pre-covid days. Not only are the IT team struggling to keep up, but the other employees are also absolutely clueless as to how to make the connections happen.

4. 

Most employees want greater support from their companies to help them with their work. The infrastructure needs to be there to support their needs in delivering the expected output. 

Few such examples are to be able to collaborate on the same documents on Cloud so that they can work on it at the same time and make on-the-fly decisions rather than making multiple reiterations over e-mails, costing time and most importantly, effort. 

It can feel excruciating to have lagging communication and especially so when you are not able to speak with the counterparty.

So after seeing the summary of the report above, are you able to answer the question in the title? Is your company cyber-ready after a few months in? The pandemic situation may not remain forever, but it may have had accelerated digitalisation and created a new normal.

Hopefully, your organisation has come out of this pandemic with greater resilience and added to itself these:

• A robust SOP for the IT department to react and respond in tandem with management swiftly
• An IM tool with proper guidelines written-out by IT 
• IT team has created FAQs and video guide on how to perform basic troubleshooting and VPN connection

To make the company develop greater culture and habits, there must be a structure in place to improve in this dynamic world and market.

If your organisation have not yet made many moves yet, the above 3 points should be able to act as a guiding light. We hope it helps you and your team!

We hope to be able to help here at HUUBAP. If your HR team needs help in the form of time attendance, leave or schedule management, or even monitoring the movements of employees to and fro office, please do not hesitate to contact us at sales@huubap.com.