Empowering IT Support to Deliver Efficiency, Reliability, and Satisfaction Across Every Interaction
Creating Seamless Tech-Driven Journeys That Empower New Hires From Day One
The employee onboarding experience is one of the first impressions new employees have of your organization. The process can be smooth or rocky depending on the systems you have in place.
Your IT team can be the backbone for many processes and systems that make your organization run effectively, and as such, your IT team should be involved in the onboarding process.
Your IT team can also function as the liaison between hiring managers and employees by helping to explain your technology processes to employees. Onboarding is not just about laptops, desktops, and smartphones. It’s also about company culture, online policies, social media guidelines, and more – all of which are enmeshed in technology.
Getting IT involved in onboarding will improve this experience in a variety of ways, leading to greater early job satisfaction.
IT has many responsibilities when it comes to employee onboarding, such as helping new hires get up to speed on new tech, tools, software, and processes.
Here are a few ways your IT team can improve the employee onboarding experience:
Documentation can include help desk tickets, policies, and procedures for specific applications or presentations on how things work at your company.
Having documentation available will be helpful when questions arise during an employee’s first week on the job and beyond. It’s important to have complete and up-to-date documentation so that new employees can get up to speed quickly. If IT documentation isn’t kept up to date, it can actually be harmful.
Here are some best practices to follow when creating IT documentation
Onboarding is a crucial part of the employee lifecycle, and it’s critical that it’s done right. The onboarding process needs to provide employees with a smooth transition from an outsider to a valued team member. It must be effective, well-planned, and supported by various departments within the company, including your in-house or outsourced IT team.
If you’re looking to find out how outsourced IT support can help your organization during onboarding and beyond, contact us at Network Right.
Protecting Sensitive Data and Simplifying Access Control in a Growing Digital Landscape
At the end of the day what stands between access to your companies SaaS Apps, web portals, and computers is a password. Employees are their logins are all possible entry points for malicious parties to access sensitive company data and now more than ever it’s important to utilize password managers to not simply remember your logins but ensure strong credentials are being used.
The goal of password manager is to offer your company and its employees a system to store private logins as well as shared accounts credentials safely & securely. Our brains (or post-it notes) are only so good at storing and remembering passwords on top of the ever growing complexity standards around them. A great password manager will make storing passwords seamless, intuitive, and offer ways to ensure you’re not just storing passwords but creating complex ones.
Here are just some of the reasons your company needs to invest in a password manager today!
The reason many set simple or easy to crack passwords tends to be cause they’re easier for them to remember. The more you add onto that with passwords for their email, computer, various SaaS apps the easier it gets for them to use simple passwords. The great thing about most modern password managers is they allow you to set 1 complex password that you use to access the app and from there you can auto-generate secure passwords for each login. This further enhances your overall security in that it trains your employees to use various passwords across platforms versus one. Further protecting in event of leaks or access to one password.
Password managers allow users to generate secure credentials based on parameters that may be required per site such as length of characters, unique symbols or numbers required, and so on. Effectively allowing you to remember your one password and letting it handle the rest for you.
The other benefit to password managers is the ease in which you can safely & securely share credentials with others in the organization. Often it happens where companies have shared accounts for departments or specific apps in order to save on license costs. Anytime anyone needs access you either need to manually share it with other employees or users are forced to remember said login.
Password managers ease this whole process by allowing sharing of logins to other users in and even outside your organization (contractors etc). Putting the login behind a portal that requires the user in question to have specific access to said login or a number of them depending on your preference. All with the ability to cut off access as needed.
Nowadays almost all modern password mangers offer some form of integration to easily login to your sites automatically via desktop apps, mobile apps, or even web browser extensions. These apps make it even easier for your employee to store new logins they create in said managers and then automatically login to the respective sites going forward. Most popular form of these include web browser add-ons/extensions which live in the browser and then handle the automatic login portion for employees. Keeping it secure and convenient. At the end of the day if the password manager tool itself isn’t convenient users won’t use it so these various forms of integration make it all the more seamless for day to day use.
Often times in IT we see the need for password, security questions, 2FA resets. Notably companies who implement password managers see a reduction in said issues as employees are empowered with the right tools. Making it more efficient for them in day to day activities spending last time hunting down passwords and simply being able to get access to their tools and get their work done.
Beyond just passwords these tools often allow for the following to be stored in them as well:
Really anything confidential that revolves around some sort of access can be stored in most of the password managers to be safely secured & protected. Beyond that other great features across some of the managers include the ability to detect leaked/compromised passwords, get an audit of re-used passwords across the company, and just generally from a security standpoint see where your company and employees stand.
Below you can find a list we recommend to our clients based on features, support for cross platforms, and ease of use.
At the end of the day your company and it’s employees will only benefit from adding a password manager to your app-stack. It’ll help across the board from overall security, implementing best practice to your employees routines, and making general day to day work easier on everyone. Make the investment today & you’ll thank us later!
Streamlining Employee Transitions With Secure, Scalable IT Processes
One of the biggest challenges existing and new clients expressed amidst the shift to a remote environment is the IT side of on/off-boarding. Coordinating that new hires get their machines all set up, additional accessories are sent out, and in the other events returned in a timely manner. All of this from a logistical side introduces some challenges for all parties involved. Thus we at Network Right have offered multiple solutions to our clientele as to how we can help handle the pressures and shift to a remote on/offboarding experience. Check out our list below to see how we can help your business!
One big piece of getting company machines out to new hires or a departing employee’s laptop is storing & shipping. We help ease the load by offering flexible solutions such as stockpiling client hardware at our offices to be ready to be prepped & shipped out as needed. As well as an ex-employees hardware to be wiped & stored in the event it ever needs to go out. Helping our clients manage their inventory of laptops, mobile devices, and so on it makes it easier to get new hires or employees transitioning sorted with less hassle.
We go as far as to help ship out the hardware on the companies behalf so your new hires have the best possible start experience they can from the IT side. To further help with efficiency if possible in certain environments we set up zero-touch deployments meaning we ship the hardware directly from a manufacture such as Apple and have software implemented so that their machine configures itself out of the box. Installing essential apps, enforcing security policies, and much more all automated.
For certain clients, we have gone as far as setting up an IT orientation that either runs separately or in tandem with HR’s onboarding process. Developing a system based on a client’s environment to have their new hires get introduced to common IT practices, apps, and so on. All with the focus of helping new hires understand the essentials of their IT setup and resources within the company.
Offering things like:
These sessions can also extend to that of terminations or off-boarding. Understanding the sensitive matters that sometimes arise, our team is readily available to connect with users and help do our best to make the transition process is seamless and secure from the companies perspective.
Dependent on a client setup we often aim to get some sort of remote desktop software to allow us to help users troubleshoot issues & or configure certain things on their machines on their behalf. Given the inability to meet in the office in some cases & resolve an issue for hires, remote software has proven to be a big productivity booster for our clients.
As mentioned in the IT orientation section, never underestimate powerful and detailed documentation. This goes a long way in remote on or offboarding that may happen last minute. Allowing other members or departments to step in. We understand sometimes things happen at a moment’s notice and want to make it easy as possible to have resources of knowledge shareable across our own team internally & our clients. So we go above & beyond documenting our process on the IT end to ensure as things change & adapt in the remote environment, we can too.
Something we preach highly amongst are clients is the need for an MDM. Read our entire article here to see in more detail what an MDM can offer your company. Where this comes into play for our role in remote on/off-boarding is multi-faceted
There are many issues that arose amidst the shift to a remote environment that physically being in the office allowed our teams to do. However with the right planning & tools in place we’ve helped many clients & their workforce ease in the transition to a remote on/off-boarding workflow.
