A Friendly Reminder That Not Everybody Is A Techie
The United Kingdom is back into lockdown since the beginning of January in an effort to reduce pressure on the NHS. Therefore, workers and students all around the country have gone back to their home offices and laptops. You’d think we’d be used to it by now! Most of us have spent the majority of 2020 working from home, discovering the best spot to answer our work emails and plan Zoom meetings – until we figured out how to superimpose a fake background onto all our Zoom video calls.
The truth, however, is that using a laptop every day doesn’t make you a tech-minded individual. Sure, we all know where the on/off button is, and how to surf the web. Yet, we still face insurmountable obstacles that slow down our day-to-day progress. When there’s no IT team on call, it’s hard to fix issues that can interfere with your work. Admittedly, it would be unfair to expect every home-based employee to have programming and It admin skills. But it’s time to address the tech taboo and make remote work more manageable for all.
Show me how to do things
It’s in every living creature’s nature to learn by mimicking someone else’s gestures. Children copy their parents to develop their skills. As such, learning how to make the most of your laptop or how to set it up for work would be more manageable if all you had to do was to follow somebody’s directions. Reading instruction manuals can be a great starting point. But, let’s be honest, how many of us enjoy reading a manual? We must prefer to be shown something than to figure it out from a long paragraph. That’s precisely where video content plays a huge role. While videos are typically a marketing conversion strategy, businesses can also use videos to make complex settings approachable for their remote staff. A video animation can provide set-by-step instructions to secure your laptop or use a VPN connection.
Introduce best practice tips for home office
Zoom is the new buzzword in remote offices. Video calls are part of our everyday work process at home. While there is a tonne of advantage to Zoom and similar video platforms, it can be counterproductive if you struggle to set up your home office to facilitate digital comms. Bad lighting, poor image quality, and muffled sounds can ruin your meeting. What’s stopping companies from preparing best practice tips and camera recommendations for their teams? It could be harmful to the business to assume that people know how to make the most of their camera and microphone settings.
Tackle essential connectivity issues
Help, I can’t connect to the wi-fi!
Why doesn’t my laptop see my headset?
My BlueTooth isn’t working.
It’s in the interest of every business to create a direct IT troubleshooting service for home office survival. Simple tasks such as resolving BlueTooth connectivity issues would typically involve the IT team. Connectivity problems are the number one challenge that home office workers face. It’s worth contracting an IT expert to answer support calls and keep your team connected.
Working from home doesn’t make you a tech specialist. When technology fails you, you need to find help to tackle the issues as quickly and effectively as possible. Businesses can’t expect their team to acquire new tech skills to make their home office setup work. It’s an unfair demand and one that could put the business at risk. Therefore, it’s in their interest to provide support, tutorials, and best practice recommendations.
