This is a good time to evaluate how well your business operates when people can’t come to the office. Most companies have many technologies in their business to keep it running, a key technology should be your intranet. Hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world have been using SharePoint for their intranets – it’s time to take stock.
Is it business as usual?
If all your staff suddenly had to work from home, would you be able to track what work has been done? Would they instantly be able to get the documents and templates they need to carry on working? Would they be able to sign in from home and carry on working? Can meetings still take place and action items allocated and tracked? Can notifications be sent to all staff with a click of a button on proceedings?
If the answer is no to any of these things, your intranet is not working. It’s time to ramp it up as soon as possible to minimize any downtime.
What should be happening?
There should be a news section on your intranet where you can send communications to all staff directly from the platform, with distribution lists ready to go. (Sharing news from a modern Communication Site, or News Web Part on Modern Pages, supported Office 365 distribution lists; or Yammer).
There should be departmental areas where people can continue to work with their team members on documents, presentations or spreadsheets. (SharePoint sites, Microsoft Teams sites).
There should be timesheets, action items, or check-in systems in place that give you instant reporting on who is where doing what. (Custom Lists or Task Lists in SharePoint, or Kaizala apps).
They should be able to save all their personal documents online till they’re ready to be shared with the team. (OneDrive).
They should be able to host virtual meetings with anyone internally or externally, with or without video, and record them automatically. (Microsoft Teams and Stream).
The technology is available to have minimum disruption to your business as long as it’s been correctly architected. If it’s not, these are some quick wins you can do to ramp up your remote workforce. Office 365 is your friend right now.
Views from Veronique 
[…] that is letting people work from home for the first time, have faith in people and know that there is technology to help you. It is daunting when you’ve never managed people like that before. It takes a lot of trust. […]
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