Remote workforces are the new normal for most businesses here in the St. Louis area, and building reliable Support for Your Remote Workforce has moved from a nice-to-have to a core operational requirement. The ability to work from home gives employees more flexibility and freedom. Secure remote access also allows companies to maintain productivity and business continuity in the event of unforeseen situations.
Working from home used to be a last resort for when employees had sick children or other important life events. It’s no longer a rare occurrence, and many businesses have had to transition to completely dispersed workforces for the foreseeable future. Remote IT help desk support and other IT services can help remove the burden from business leaders, new hires, and all of the individual contributors in between. That’s exactly the role great Support for Your Remote Workforce is built to play.
Remote Work Is Here to Stay
A variety of experts — from the Harvard Business Review to Forbes — have observed that future-minded companies are leaning into remote work. Unfortunately, many businesses have recently realized they weren’t ready to have everyone work from home at the same time. Managers are spending their days fielding questions and keeping everyone else on track instead of focusing on their own productivity. That’s why the best IT service providers build comprehensive onboarding processes for your entire company — so Support for Your Remote Workforce starts on day one, not after the first outage.
Business leaders and technologists shouldn’t be the only ones who know how to host a remote meeting or connect to the remote desktop. When your technology partner addresses everyone on your org chart, the leadership spends less time putting out fires and managing other snags. Every employee should know how to prevent security risks, navigate the technology they need to stay productive, and get help from the IT service desk when something does go wrong.
To continue moving forward on this path, companies are going to need strong IT help desk coverage. Responsive IT services allow companies to get back up to speed as quickly as possible and stay on the right track for the long haul — which is really what Support for Your Remote Workforce is meant to deliver.
Questions to Ask Before You Choose a Partner
Before signing with any IT company, put these questions on the table. The answers will tell you whether a prospective provider can actually deliver Support for Your Remote Workforce, or whether they only know how to troubleshoot a traditional office:
- Can you troubleshoot remotely to keep your essential IT services in play everywhere?
- How will working outside of a centralized office raise new cybersecurity risks that could jeopardize your business data and your customers’ privacy?
- Will employees still have convenient access to all of the files, folders, and applications they need to stay productive?
- Can you digitize your communication and processes to prevent interruptions to your workflows?
A serious provider will have clear, practiced answers for each of those — not vague marketing language.
What Strong Support for Your Remote Workforce Actually Looks Like
Recent history has been hard on small companies, and business leaders are looking for ways to recover as quickly as possible. Simply put, many organizations don’t have the time or resources to handle many more setbacks right now. Choosing an outsourced IT company should inspire confidence and help you rest assured that your technology solutions are in good hands.
At a practical level, Support for Your Remote Workforce should cover four specific areas:
- Secure remote access — VPNs, zero-trust network access, or cloud-native identity so employees can reach what they need without exposing the network to the public internet.
- Endpoint security — consistent patching, endpoint detection and response, and disk encryption across every laptop, regardless of where it physically lives.
- Collaboration tooling — a supported stack for video conferencing, chat, file sharing, and document collaboration so nobody is improvising on consumer apps.
- Responsive help desk — a real person answering tickets in minutes, not hours, and ideally with the ability to remote into a user’s device to fix problems on the spot.
When all four pieces are in place, your team stops noticing IT — which is exactly the experience good Support for Your Remote Workforce should produce.
How to Evaluate Potential Partners
Refine your search by focusing on potential partners with proven track records. An IT company with experience in your industry will know what it takes to make you successful. The best IT companies in St. Louis also receive awards that speak to their capabilities — third-party recognition is one of the most reliable signals that a provider’s Support for Your Remote Workforce is actually being delivered, not just marketed.
Ask for references. Ask to see sample ticket-response times. Ask what happens if your primary technician is on vacation. And ask how they onboard new employees so that a remote hire is productive on day one, not day three.
Work With a Team That Specializes in Remote IT
Our team at ThrottleNet is regularly recognized as the #1 business IT support help desk in St. Louis because of the work we do for our customers. Since we’re so confident in our ability to deliver Support for Your Remote Workforce across any industry, we’re able to offer free trials, monthly contracts, and real win-win opportunities. Either we’ll earn your business, or the first month is on the house.
Contact us today to get started!
