Work From Home: Equip your employees

Q. What do my employees need to work from home?

A. Initially, this first column was going to cover transitioning employees home, but the COVID-19 pandemic taught everyone that lesson very quickly! Now that most of us have a home-based workforce, we need to equip the home office with everything our employees need to get the work done effectively and efficiently.

ACU-Serve transitioned to a work at home model three years ago and now manages employees in almost every state, as well as a large offshore workforce. We manage everything from our corporate office in Akron, Ohio, with the mantra of “one to many.”

ACU-Serve currently manages 500-plus remote FTEs with five managers and one executive vice president of operations. We have spent years developing our workflow and the logic that drives claim work queues. This identifies who should engage with a claim and why. By utilizing this type of logic, we can let technology help us manage more resources without adding management staff. I will get into more detail on that during this series.

The first piece of the puzzle is Internet speed. Before sending your employees home, be sure they have enough bandwidth to do the work without painful wait times. You can easily do an Internet speed test using a smart phone.

Next is the hardware they will use in the home office. ACU-Serve uses AWS (Amazon Web Services) for its cloud-based presence and pre-configures the AWS workspaces and zero-client workstations prior to sending them to remote employees. This allows them to hit the ground running when they receive their “office in a box.” We use a 10Zig zero client that acts as the processor, as well as the device that FTEs plug monitors, mice and keyboards into. The device is HIPAA-compliant and takes up very little space. We also send everyone three monitors (including a stand), softphone and headset, and the necessary cables and miscellaneous supplies.

John Stalnaker is vice president of sales at ACU-Serve Corp. Reach him at jstalnaker@acuservecorp.com.