Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Companies Experience Blockades in Shifting to Home Workforce
With a national state of emergency and some parts of the country under “shelter in place” orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the American workforce is facing a crisis unlike anything since World War 2. While many non-essential businesses are shuttering to ride out the storm, critical industries and functions need to carry on. Many companies have chosen to implement remote working scenarios to keep financial operations, customer care, shipping and retail and healthcare services. But the nation’s workforce isn’t ready, in all cases, to accommodate a mass work-from-home scenario. For many companies, the biggest problem will be about security of confidential information, customer data, usernames and passwords and financial information. For others, including call centers, it will be about ensuring adequate workforce coverage for essential tasks.
Scammers are Ready to Pounce
Scammers seldom miss a good opportunity to prey on current events, and this is no exception. Home computers aren’t as well secured as work-based hardware, and this could lead to an upswing in hacking, according to Fast Company’s Mark Sullivan.
“Experts say that cybercrooks are at this very moment devising ways of taking advantage of millions of employees transitioning to work-from-home situations,” wrote Sullivan. “They know that employees will be connecting to their companies’ servers and other resources in a very different way. They are also aware that many employees will be doing their work on computers normally used for personal affairs, and that other workers will rely more on their mobile devices in the absence of a work computer.”
To combat the problem, IT security experts are recommending that companies implement multi-factor identification across the organization, including any devices that home-based workers are using. It also helps to educate employees to be wary of the inevitable phishing scams in the form of messages crafted to look like they come from the CDC, the WHO, government agencies or other official sounding sites. Ensure that workers don’t click on any links or open any attachments that haven’t been vetted by the company’s IT team.
Bring Out the Business Continuity Plan
If you have a business continuity plan – and you should – you likely already have some protocols in place for an emergency of this nature. (Or use the plan you’ve crafted for large-scale power outages or other emergencies.) If you must have some workers in the office, consider alternating office-based workers and home-based workers to keep the numbers of people congregating down. Goldman Sachs, for example, has workers assigned to “blue” and “white” teams, and these teams are alternating weekly between working from home and in one of its main offices. When workers are in the office, have IT thoroughly check out the devices they’ll be using to work from home and ensure that security protocols are enforced.
To ensure business coverage remains steady, rely on your organization’s workforce scheduling solution to make sure workers are logged in and working when they should be, and that you have adequate staff to cover any bare spots. You may need to get clever with employee schedules and take a staggered work approach to ensure continuity. It may be time to throw out your current schedules and start afresh.
Provide Guidance to Home-Based Workers
It goes without saying that workers are anxious, which may impede their ability to do their jobs. Rather than leaving them to navigate home working and hope for the best, continue to offer management guidance through emails, chat, phone calls, video conferencing. Helping everyone touch base several times a week with coworkers and managers can minimize business interruptions and keep the workforce calm and focused.
Edited by Maurice Nagle