IT Guide to Reopening Your Office

It’s been a few months since many organizations made the rapid transition a remote work environment, and businesses are beginning to look ahead at what the future holds for work and their organization. Though there is no clear path, the time taken to understand the impact COVID-19 has taken on organizations has also enabled them to anticipate and prepare a strategy for the future – whether that future is reopening business, continuing to work remotely, or considering operational needs.

However, many questions still remain when it comes to the future of work. Your business has operational and strategic needs, and your employees need support. Anticipating needs and preparing a strategy is a start, but you can only plan for what you can identify. Uncovering a better view of your needs, building a strategy for implementation, and creating short and long term plans are crucial to the success of your return to work efforts. 

The following article will explore two critical areas for organizations looking to reopen their offices and start returning employees to the office. The first is an IT component, examining budget strategies and evaluation techniques to address technological demands in your organization. The second is the needs of your returning employees – or students, if you are in an educational environment – in order to stay healthy. This includes social distancing, entry screening, and occupancy tracking.

There are so many facets of reopening a business safely that no one article can cover them all without rivaling a Stephen King novel in length. To that extent, we’ve taken a look at several areas of reopening a business, discussed with CDW experts, and identified IT needs and personnel needs as two components we want to discuss today.

IT needs are critical to every organization, but every organization is going to have different demands for their IT infrastructure and assets. This comes down to several areas, and when you add an unpredictable variable like COVID-19 into the mix, these assets need to be approached and thought about in new ways. We’re here to help build a new scope and perspective, as well as offer guidance on what businesses should look for and consider. 

You also must consider the safety and needs of your employees who are returning to the workplace. The rapid spread of COVID-19 has made it a new challenge to manage, but several CDC guidelines has helped identify possible ways for businesses to reopen. Our role here is to help introduce potential ways this can be achieved through both technology and resources, keeping you informed so that you can continue planning and having more meaningful, precise conversations about what you need to get your employees back safely and keep them healthy while they’re in the office.

As mentioned, this article is meant to help add new perspective and strategies to your reopening efforts. You may have more questions beyond what we have addressed today. That’s good, and we’re here to answer those questions because we have more answers that can help meet your needs or address your uncertainties. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have more questions, because that’s what we’re here for.

With that said, here is a look at some reopening strategies you can take for your IT assets and infrastructure as well as keeping your employees safe in the office.

The move to work from home came with a sense of immediacy for many organizations, but that urgency also left many flying by the seat of their pants. This meant that many were scrambling to react rather than adapt. As we know, reaction can help clear the immediate hurdles, but now organizations must revisit and review their IT assets and software usage.

The most immediate question may be “why?” as in “why would we need to go back and review our situation if it’s working?” The answer is multi-pronged, but let’s think of this situation as a boat you kept from sinking in the middle of a storm. You weathered the torrent of rain, wind and waves, but you did so by plugging leaks on the boat with duct tape and utilizing extra resources on your ship you hadn’t otherwise planned to use. You did the right thing – the ship and your crew survived! - but now that the storm has calmed it’s time to understand what you’ve done to stay afloat.

Your IT situation is no different. You've survived the shock of suddenly having to move your workforce to a remote work environment. It may have come with modifications to your hardware infrastructure, providing more resources and assets to each end user, or taking advantage of free software trials for collaboration and communication.

You may have done these things with such a rapid sense of urgency that you may have overlooked a trial period or how much hardware you really ordered. Now is the time to review everything that's changed and deployed. The best way to do that is by getting a full snapshot through an IT asset assessment. 

What “next steps” of this IT asset and usage experience will this snapshot enable you to achieve? Well, that’s dependent on what you’re doing now. For some organizations this can help assess risk and expenses, while others can be surgical in ways to save on budget. Some might use this snapshot to evaluate app deployment environment so they know what applications are – and aren’t – being used, and some may just use this as a way to get an overview of endpoint engagements.

The goal is to enable action through knowledge. In other words, if you know your IT assets and usage, you can make the right choices for whatever action you need to take now or in the future. Being strategic and insightful today means being smart and decisive tomorrow, which can help with cost-saving efforts as well as understanding your workforce better to either support them or mitigate pain points. It starts with knowledge, and knowledge can be best gained through a holistic understanding of your IT assets and usage.

Offices reopening face several new challenges they hadn’t dealt with before. Some of these challenges, however, will be evolutions on things already being done. For example, sanitizing the office seems to go hand-in-hand with a nightly cleaning or employees wiping down their desk. Why, then, would sanitization services be considered? Why not just continue wiping down work areas nightly, or let devices sit so any germs can die off naturally?

There are several answers to this question. First, not all devices are equal – they'll need different cleaning methods and different disinfecting treatments. This is not only based on usage, but also based on the device itself. Second, the products you need to use to properly disinfect and sanitize the office may differ from what you already have available. Third, you may not have the right PPE on hand, or know where to clean beyond surfaces. Sanitation, especially in the situation we’re currently in, is different from what we know.

Keeping your employees healthy as they return to the office means taking the necessary precautions. Sanitization services can help your office open safely because the right service not only will address the above answers, they’ll do it with the right knowledge and certifications to support their cleaning.

For example, CDW SanitizeIT Services partner with ISSA and are pandemic certified, with training by John Hopkins and CDC coordination. They use CDC approved cleaning supplies, utilize proper PPE and factor in sanitization aspects like a virus’ dwell time. They also can target specific devices based on services needed. This type of effort is what differentiates a sanitization service that helps reopening an office during this pandemic, and why it can help with your efforts in the short and long term to both keep your office open and keep your employees safe.

The sudden shift to remote work meant organizations had to reprioritize budgets and purchases on the fly. Adjusting for remote workspaces, collaboration tools and productivity resources was just a short list of the many different considerations companies had to make. However, the money used to get your team working remote quickly needed to come from somewhere, and those considerations may have impacted your ability to perform planned maintenance and upgrades on your hardware and infrastructure. What’s more, you don’t know how long COVID-19's impact on work will last, and the residual impact could continue to eat at budget for planned hardware upgrades and refreshes.

You can’t turn back the clocks on your data center hardware, but you can give them extra life with a warranty extension. Though this will not be the replacement or upgrade you may have planned in your near future, what a warranty extension does do is protect your systems from going down and having to make replacements out of pocket. This achieves two things: helps you keep a balanced budget in times of continuous uncertainty and flux, and protects your equipment from breaking down and leaving you without any viable options.

An extended warranty does something critical: it buys you time by giving your current data center infrastructure an extra life.

Social distancing has been a key part in strategies for reducing the spread of COVID-19, as well as being aware of one’s health. While offices and businesses look to bring employees and customers back from working and shopping remotely, precautions must take place. This means that new best practices must be implemented, along with the technology to help.

Let’s start with entry into an office, school or business. Two considerations must take place at the door: how many people are coming in and do any of these people have potential symptoms or concerns that might cause the spread of COVID. Stationing people at the point of entry can quickly create congestion problems, slowing down entry to a trickle. 

That’s where technology can help. Thermal cameras and occupancy tracking tools can help automate the process so that you free up people who would otherwise have to do this process manually and reduce entry-point congestion. Thermal cameras can detect elevated body temperature. Though this is not a direct way to detect a fever, it can help identify someone who may have a fever so that they can get a more accurate read from a thermometer. Think of this as the two-factor authentication for entry into the office, business or school.

These cameras can also automate counting the amount of people entering at one time. Social distancing means less people in an enclosed area and having a precise count, so your office or business doesn’t get overcrowded is key. This is an area where technology can also support you. Cameras stationed at the entrances can keep up with the flow of people entering, alerting staff on site when capacity is getting close to max. This can help ensure safe social distancing before it becomes a problem.