ITSM Best Practices For Efficient Remote Work & Management

Even though the number of people distancing and working remotely has been growing over the last couple of years, their work continues without interruptions. Today, an increasing number of companies are relying more on remote work than ever before.

 

Casually walking to other departments or seeking updates from colleagues has now been replaced by live chats, lengthy emails, and video calls. Things seem to be going on well, but not for all companies.

 

The only companies that are reaping the success of remote work are those that have followed the best practices for efficient remote work and management. 

 

Here are some of the practices that they are following;

 

Using Queues For Work Prioritization

 

There are many distractions when people are working in an open office. For instance, some colleagues might be loud when making calls or might engage in conversations near you when you are busy handling a challenging task.

 

This does not mean that there are no distractions when people start working remotely. They might even be more for some people who have to deal with children and other people while at the same time switching between different screens or windows for their work.

 

These are things that can affect the productivity of your employees. To avoid these issues, you need a way to keep yourself focused on a certain task. This is where service desk tools come in. These tools help you use queues and prioritize the most important or the right task at the right time.

 

Automation is also important when setting up queues for work prioritization. You can use automation tools to handle some of your repetitive tasks and only focus on those that cannot be automated.

 

Gain Visibility With Service Desk

 

One of the disadvantages of working from the office or in an open office setup is micro-management. This is something that can hurt the productivity of your employees. Fortunately, this can be eliminated with efficient remote work and management.

 

With IT service management taking care of work requests, organizations can easily gain visibility into the status of issues and tasks. They can also see how the tasks and issues are progressing without having to physically talk to anyone.

 

Even though there are different video conferencing tools that organizations can use to communicate, they need an elaborate ticketing system that can track issues well and control conversations between workers and the organization heads.

 

These systems allow organizations to hold responsible workers accountable for tasks that are not handled well. In addition, they make it easy for organizations to make sure that even though employees are working from home, no tasks are left unattended.

 

Create a Knowledge Hub

 

One of the most important things for any organization that wants to implement efficient remote work and management is creating a knowledge hub that can be accessed easily by all employees. This is essential in ensuring that all employees work asynchronously following the right procedures and regulations.

 

Working remotely means that employees will not have direct access to the HR team. Instead of sending repetitive emails asking the same questions, the HR team can share this information on the knowledge hub for employees’ easy access.

 

You can add an FAQ page on this knowledge hub for all the frequently asked questions. All employees should be directed to this knowledge hub before they can ask any questions directly to HR teams.

 

If you do not want to have employees contacting HR teams for their questions, you can add a ticketing system on the knowledge hub for employees to create tickets for their questions. HR teams can then address any issues and add the questions and answers to the FAQ page.

 

Create Effective Self-Service With Task Automation

 

As discussed above, automation is an important part of efficient remote work and management. However, if you implement automation in an inefficient ITSM, then you will just be enhancing the inefficiency.

 

You, therefore, need to first map out all the tasks handled by your employees and then implement efficient business process automation. With correct and efficient automation, you will be creating enough time for your employees to work on more complicated tasks.

 

In addition, you will create a way for customers to serve themselves and support their processes without having to interact with your employees. When implementing task automation, first look at tasks that have some form of automation. The most important thing is to make sure that your automation efforts complement your employees, not replace them.

 

Work With an Effective ITSM Team

 

As much as you can find and work with the best ITSM tools to enhance remote work and management, you also need an effective ITSM team. You need to make sure that you have created a team in your IT department to handle all ITSM needs.

 

This team needs to be created before you start implementing changes or updates in your ITSM. The most important thing to consider when creating this team is your working style. For instance, which is better between agile and the traditional style for your team?

 

Since you will not be creating this team from scratch, you understand each one of your employees and know how they work. Depending on their strengths, create a team that can handle all ITSM issues effectively for efficient remote work and management.

 

Establish KPIs and Metrics for ITSM

 

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics are very important when it comes to monitoring the performance of any ITSM software, applications, or add-ons that you might use in your organization.

 

They also help with strategy definition and allow organizations to identify any areas that they might need to improve. Without these KPIs, you will not be able to determine how successful your ITSM is.

 

There are different key metrics you might consider tracking. Some of them include employee satisfaction and experience, speed, operational costs, success and failure of your software applications, and level of self-service usage, among others.

 

Remote work is taking the world by storm. Today, employees can work from anywhere, whether at home, at their favorite restaurants, or even when traveling. We are going to see more companies allowing their employees to work from home. 

 

For instance, multinational companies such as Facebook are allowing nearly all their employees to work from home, as long as their jobs can be done remotely. However, for this to work, they have to implement the best practices discussed above for efficient remote work and management.