90% of engineering leaders agree that “software engineers are more valuable than capital.” But despite that premium value, just 50% of engineering leaders are “very satisfied” with the performance of their engineering teams.

In the 2020 Interview Gap report, Karat explores how COVID-19 has changed the developer hiring landscape and looks at what the most successful companies are doing to accelerate hiring by making their interviews more predictive, fair, and enjoyable. 

Read the full report: http://go.karat.com/Software_Engineering_2020_Interview_Gap

Tech, catering and design companies are rushing to sell employers on fever scanners, box lunches and office floor-planning apps for social distancing. But it’s too soon to tell if they will work.

Truework, an income verification start-up, recently introduced software to help employers keep track of their workers’ health status.

Gensler, an architecture and design firm, has a workplace floor-planning app that generates social-distancing layouts for desks and other office furniture.

PwC, the professional services firm, is using technology that it originally developed to track inventory for a newcontact-tracing system that logs employee interactions so workers can be notified in the event of exposure to the coronavirus.

With companies pressing to figure out how to safely reopen workplaces, makers of everything from office furniture to smart ventilation systems are rushing to sell them products and services marketed as solutions. Some companies, like makers of thermal cameras that sense skin temperature, are rebranding their wares as virus-containment fever-scanning products. Others are creating entirely new services.

And they have a captive market. To protect employees and reduce liability for virus outbreaks at work, companies are racing to comply with public health guidelines on issues like employee screening and social distancing. In the United States, the market for contact-tracing technologies for employers could soon be worth $4 billion annually, according to estimates from International Data Corporation, a market research firm.

But the preventive tools and pandemic workplace rules are so new — as is the emerging science on the virus — that it is too soon to tell how well, or if, they work.

“These are all untested theories and methods right now,” said Laura Becker, a research manager focusing on employee experience at I.D.C. “What is going to be the most effective component of all of these work force return strategies? We don’t know.”

The Lobby

When workers eventually return to the office, they may find that the lobby resembles an airport security checkpoint. At least that’s the vision that Kastle Systems, a 48-year-old Falls Church, Va., company that designs, installs and monitors security systems for several thousand commercial buildings, recently began marketing to its clients.

Businesses that use the company’s coronavirus management system, KastleSafeSpaces , may ask employees to download an app that will automatically open entrance doors for people eligible to come to the office. Workers who fill out a health screening questionnaire ahead of time may proceed to a lobby fast lane to have their temperatures checked. Those who have been asked to stay home because they recently tested positive for coronavirus may go on a kind of no-fly list and find that doors will automatically stay closed for them.

“The idea is really to create this profile where you can identify who is known safe, who’s known not safe and then who needs to be screened when they get in,” said Mark D. Ein , the chairman of Kastle. “It’s a little bit like airports where you have Clear precheck or regular check, depending on people’s profile.”

Clear, the biometric identification company known for its air-traveler identification service, recently introduced a system called Health Pass  for office buildings, restaurants, retailers, cruise ships and sports arenas. It will use facial recognition to confirm employees’ identities and vet worker-provided health information — such as symptom data and verified test results — so they can be cleared to enter workplaces. Caryn Seidman-Becker, Clear’s chief executive, said this kind of multilayered approach to entry screening could help reduce risk for employers and create a safer working environment.

Read the full article here!

In August of 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed two new federal laws – Kari’s Law and the Ray Baum’s Act. In our two-part guide to these recent laws and their impact on multi-line telephone systems (MLTS), we’ll look at the following:

• Definition of Kari’s Law
• Story behind Kari’s Law
• Goal and Meaning of Kari’s Law
• Implementation impacts on MLTS

In today’s Part 1, we’ll be examining Kari’s Law. In Part 2, we will examine the RAY BAUM’s Act.

What Is Kari’s Law? Explanation And Definition From The FCC

At its core, Kari’s Law puts a Federal mandate on an assumption many individuals may have already had: no matter where you are, dialing 9-1-1 will connect you to the emergency number. 

In facilities using multi-line telephone systems – such as motels and most businesses – callers have to enter a prefix or access code, typically ‘9’, before entering in an outbound call. In the heartbreaking tragedy that led to the resolution, a child who had learned about calling 911 for help in school was unable to do so in an emergency due to this requisite. 

From the FCC notification:

“Kari’s Law requires direct 911 dialing and notification capabilities in multi-line telephone systems (MLTS), which are typically found in enterprises such as office buildings, campuses, and hotels.

Under the statute and the Commission’s rules, MLTS manufacturers and vendors must pre-configure these systems to support direct dialing of 911—that is, to enable the user to dial 911 without having to dial any prefix or access code, such as the number 9.” (emphasis added)

Kari’s Law Requirements:

• All MLTS phone systems must allow callers to reach 911 with no prefix required. (911 not 9-911 or 8-911).
• A Notification of the emergency call must be made to another location or party with the fact that a 911 call has been made, a valid callback number, and the caller’s location as conveyed to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP / 911 Center).

While older systems are exempt from the law, it is unclear how system updates impact the reach of the law on updated systems…

To read the full article, click here!

As businesses look for quick, low-cost ways to improve marketing performance in the face of an economic downturn, one area that often presents a good amount of opportunity is website conversion rate optimization.

We’ve discussed how analytics, SEO and user experience play into website optimization in the past. Today, we’ll be digging into one specific tool that is widely used to optimize user experience through analytics: Hotjar.

How Hotjar Works

For the uninitiated, Hotjar is a tool that provides behavior analytics, heatmap tracking, visitor recordings and more to help marketers, product managers and UX designers understand how a website is being used – and how it can be improved.

The tool is marketed as a “fast and visual way to understand your users.” Having used Hotjar, I can attest that it is visual and does help you understand your users. As to whether it’s fast, part of that depends on your definition of fast, but it also depends on how you use the tool. In particular, while the session recordings tool has incredible potential for understanding user behavior, it also has potential for being a time suck.

(Session recording image courtesy of Hotjar)

Each session recording shows you where the user is looking and navigating in terms of pages viewed, clicks, taps and mouse movements (the latter represented as lines on the screen). The length of each recording is the length of the corresponding session on your site. So, depending on how many sessions you’ve recorded with Hotjar, you could easily end up with hours and hours of recordings to sift through.

If your plan is to turn on the tracking, review the recordings and wait for the insights to present themselves, there’s a decent chance that you’ll end up investing several hours of your time and some of your sanity for little in the way of actionable, data-driven takeaways. Sure, you might get lucky and land on some legitimate insights, but you’re busy and you want the most value from the tool as quickly as possible.

Here are our tips for how to analyze Hotjar recordings efficiently.

Get Specific With Your Goals

If you’re considering using Hotjar (or have implemented it already and haven’t dug into the recordings yet), you presumably at least have some general goals for how the insights might improve your site, like increasing conversion rates or reducing bounce rates.

To get the most out of your analysis and avoid wasted time, write down your goals, then refine them until they’re as clear and focused as possible.  

What does clear and focused look like? Let’s use a couple examples.

• Okay goal: “I want to understand why more users aren’t converting on my site.”
• Better goal: “I want to understand where users are getting confused or stuck on our top three conversion pages.”

The difference: While the first goal will help ensure you’re keeping an eye out for drop-offs, it’s starting broad – especially if your website has a lot of pages. Trying to synthesize behaviors across all users and all pages won’t be an easy task without the help of big data software. By specifying your goal to a select group of conversion pages and looking for common issues, you can focus your efforts on a smaller sample size of recordings for a more efficient analysis.

• Okay goal: “How are users using the site now?”
• Better goal: “What are the most common behaviors among visitors entering the site via the homepage?”

The difference: For most businesses, there will be a multitude of different types of website visitors who are taking different actions based on different goals. Taking a general approach to understanding commonalities between them all would likely take a long time and produce less-than-useful takeaways. Instead, consider looking through a narrower lens to see how a specific segment of users behave. If you can make meaningful improvements to a high impact page like the homepage as a result, it’ll be time well spent.

Whether you’re looking to improve your e-commerce user experience or optimize your SaaS product, taking this more specific approach to goal-setting will save time and produce more actionable insights.

Use Hotjar’s Time-Saving Features

If the prospect of analyzing a mountain of recordings gives you anxiety, you can take some comfort in the fact that Hotjar provides a number of features to organize and streamline this task.

Here are a few to take advantage of:

• Filter – once you’ve defined your specific goals, use the filter to drill down to a set of pages, locations, devices etc. so you’re only reviewing relevant sessions.
• Change the speed – you can speed up the videos up to 4x, though 1.5x or 2x will be easier to analyze.
• Skip pauses – many visitors will go idle for extended periods of time in a session. You can tell Hotjar to skip these , which will speed up the review process significantly, but it will also make it harder to pinpoint where the pauses are happening.
• Tag recordings – Hotjar allows for manual and automatic tagging which allows you to note important actions such as conversions, CTA clicks and more. These can then be used as filter parameters or to group similar sessions for further analysis.

Take Good Notes

The Hotjar PLUS and BUSINESS plans let you add notes directly into a recording. These notes will show on the playback timeline. It’s a convenient feature, but if your plan doesn’t include it, you’ll still want to be methodical and organized in your note-taking.

Use whatever form of note-taking works best for you (I did pen and paper then transcribed to Word) – but keep in mind: the better organized your notes are, the less time you’ll need to spend parsing through what you wrote later.

Divide and Conquer

Have another data-driven member of the team willing to help out? Get aligned on the goals, then divide up the recordings for a faster analysis. In addition to shortening the timeline, this also has the added benefit of bringing another perspective into the mix. If your teammate is someone you trust with the job, they can stress-test your conclusions while potentially uncovering insights that may not have been apparent to you.  

When dividing up the workload, be strategic about how many team members you bring in. While I found two to be a good size team for analysis, I’d be hesitant to divide up amongst a big group. The more people you bring in, the more potential there is for several conflicting takeaways – and then you’re back at square one.

Prioritize Turning Your Insights Into a Testing Plan

Once you’ve done the heavy lifting and the analysis is done, don’t stop to rest just yet. Keep the momentum and translate your insights into a testing plan so that you can start notching some quick wins.

For each takeaway, craft a hypothesis. For example, if the takeaway is that X% of users dropped from a page when they got to the case studies section, you might have a hypothesis that if you remove case studies from the page, you can reduce the bounce rate by Y%.

Once you’ve created all of your hypotheses, prioritize them by potential impact on overall performance (typically by weighting the highest trafficked pages and most important conversion pages). Now, set dates and a duration for each test, and start chipping away.

Fast and Easy?

Following the tips here will help ensure you’re making the most of the time you invest analyzing your Hotjar recordings. But there’s no way around it: there is some time investment required. (In my experience, it takes watching at least a dozen or so sessions before I’m in a flow, and ideally I can carve out a couple uninterrupted hours to hunker down and focus on it.) On top of that, ongoing reviews will net more useful insights for continued optimization than any one-off analysis.

That said, the time and resource investment is very manageable relative to many other marketing channels – and the potential for ROI is high. Of course, if you’re simply too busy to manage all of this yourself, you can always delegate it to a team who lives and breathes this stuff for a living. 

On May 27, 2020, Logical Media Group held a webinar about Navigating the New Normal in Amazon Marketing.

Register to watch this on-demand recording here!

As more states begin their official economic reopenings in the wake of COVID-19, many organizations feel like resuming the work itself isn’t the biggest challenge. For many of us, reengaging and rebuilding our teams of talented professionals and getting them motivated and bought-in to the new way of work is an extremely daunting task.

Many people are scared, distrustful, and depressed right now, and that is the exact opposite of the recipe for a successful team. Whether they know it or not, professionals are hungry for their employers to help them feel normal and plugged-in again. That means employee culture and engagement should be points of emphasis for every business in the coming weeks and months.

Identifying the Best Aspects of Your “Pre-COVID” Culture

It may seem like a long time ago now, but less than three months ago, you had a thriving community sharing a physical space and working towards common goals – some of your team members might even have compared it to being part of a family!

The realities of COVID-19 mean that workplace culture and team atmosphere can’t resume with perfect continuity. With that said, there is the potential to create a new, even stronger community by porting what worked about your previous approach onto new methodologies and emerging best practices in light of COVID-19.

How Do We Figure Out the Best Parts of Our Culture?

Your team members are the best source of information when it comes to which parts of your workplace culture, employee wellness initiatives, and daily perks really make a difference for them. You can get that information through employee culture surveys, which can be blasted out team-wide via email as you plan your return to the office.

If possible, you should do this work in the weeks ahead of your reopen to give your new initiatives the most possible planning time. However, if getting people back into the building is the main priority, you can use the opening weeks of the return to work to gather this data to inform your employee engagement strategy.

What About Employee Mental Health?

Workplace culture and collegiality are crucial to creating a positive work environment that drives work people can be proud about while robustly supporting people’s humanistic and mental health needs to prevent tension, frustration, and burnout.

One of your culture survey’s main goals should be determining what services you were providing that people found really valuable pre-COVID. Did they value seeing their colleagues in contexts other than work? Did they appreciate making time for serious conversations during the work week? What made them go home feeling good about themselves at the end of the day?

What Strengthened the Team?

As the old axiom goes, “teamwork makes the dream work.” While it may sound trite at first, bringing your employees together to create a true team is the difference between having a great approach to human capital management and just being a “job” where people work.

Another main concern of your employee surveys should be to identify what aspects of your pre-COVID-19 approach brought people together to create a more functional, vivacious unit. What made people feel like true colleagues and not just people who worked in the same space? How did you help team members discover, appreciate, and celebrate each other’s strengths? How did you foster an environment where people understood and were not judgmental about their colleagues’ areas of need or weakness?

What Gave People a Sense of Shared Purpose?

If you’ve got people feeling positive about themselves and their work and functioning as part of a thriving team, there’s only one real component left to a great culture: shared goals and purpose.

In order to get your employees reintegrated into the work and making up for lost time, you need to figure out what messages, incentives, and motivational tactics really worked for them. What about your organization or leadership did they find inspirational? What about the nature of your work makes team members feel good about what they’re doing? What approaches to shared success and shared failure spoke to them?

Leveraging Technology to Modify & Modernize

Once you’ve drawn out the aspects of your workplace and employee culture that really worked and inspired excellence, you’ll likely have a long list of activities and approaches that feel like a real challenge to recreate in the context of social distancing.

At first, this can feel discouraging, but luckily, the last few months have seen an explosion of remote communication and interaction platforms that enable us to continue positive community interactions without the risk of viral transmission.

Migrating Physical Interactions Online

Video conferencing and project management platforms have picked up much of the slack during our time away from the office, and they also offer opportunities for employee culture reengagement.

Think of ways you can allow people to “take a walk” to visit friends in other departments for a quick chat like they used to. Provide people with document sharing and collaboration tools that make it just as easy to work together as if you were sitting at the same table. Consider meeting in a text-based chatroom where people have time to think about their responses and process other people’s ideas at their own pace.

All of these are different ways we can use emerging work tools as culture tools as well!

Embracing an Opportunity to Grow & Redefine the Work

It’s important to understand that there will not be a cut and dry way to completely recreate our previous approach to office life and employee culture post-COVID-19. We will need to stay open-minded and identify employee needs in order to find solutions and approaches that support them.

With that in mind, this is an opportunity to grow and redefine what it even means to be a business, a team, and a professional. The new work will be finding ways to continue and extend intellectual and communal closeness without the benefit of physical proximity.

If we stay open minded, remain grounded in what we know works and what employees need, and keep our ears to the ground for the best emerging tools and solutions, we’ll be able to reopen the business space in a powerful way that makes all of us better.

How to Learn More

If you’re an HR professional or business leader looking to guide a successful reopening as COVID-19 continues, be sure to download Launchways’ Complete Return to Work Toolkit. The toolkit provides a variety of checklists and other resources that help you consider reopening from every conceivable angle, including:

• Recalling furloughed or laid off employees
• Modifying your physical workspace
• Best practices for employee safety
• Personal protective equipment (PPE)
• New policies for meeting, communication, shared space, etc.
• Bringing people together while distancing

The times, they are a-changin.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, health systems are facing major challenges engaging patients while struggling to recoup lost revenue.

On the flipside, patients who have been delaying acute care needs and preventive visits, continue to wonder if it’s safe to receive in-person care or if virtual visits are a suitable alternative.

Neither health systems nor patients can continue to delay care. Now that we have standardized safety guidelines in place, as well as proven success with virtual care, health systems are better equipped to engage their patients and book necessary care.

Getting back to business as usual will be challenging, but one of the most important things health systems can do right now is encourage patients to access care again. By educating patients on safety measures in place and their options for care, health systems can start building patient trust and booking visits to recoup lost revenue.

Upfront and Zipnosis have joined forces to deliver proactive and trustworthy digital communication while guiding patients to the best mode of care for their needs and comfort level – whether that is in-person or virtual care.

“Upfront and Zipnosis have created a safe, clear, and convenient way for patients to book their previously planned or current healthcare needs. Consumers are anxious about how and when they will come back into the healthcare system. They want to know how they can get safe and high-quality care,” said Catherine Murphy, Zipnosis COO. “Together, Upfront and Zipnosis provide a complete solution that engages, educates, and provides a simple pathway to book appointments in person or virtually.”

Below are the key benefits of the combined solution:

Recoup revenue

• As the backlog for care continues to increase, we’re here to help health systems retain patients. Through personalized communications, we provide patients options for receiving care even in the midst of COVID-19. We quickly move them to action to either access on-demand virtual care or book a virtual or in-person appointment.

Improve patient outcomes

• Health systems cannot improve their patient’s health and wellbeing, if they’re not engaged. Clients using our solution have seen a 60 percent patient activation rate and a 45 percent increase in necessary visit completion.

Eliminate inefficient processes

• Calling and sending letters to patients for visit recall is not only inefficient, it’s expensive. Break the status quo by activating all patients with relevant communications and strategic call-to-actions in the palm of their hands.

Strengthen brand recognition

• Help patients get to know your health system through consistent, automated communications personalized to your patients. Be a lifelong partner, not just an annual check off the list.

Learn more about our exciting partnership here!

Centro announced an API integration with Microsoft Advertising to automate paid search campaign management and reporting. Centro’s customers that also use Microsoft’s self-serve ad platform now receive real-time performance data in Centro’s Basis platform. Basis is the most comprehensive, automated, and intelligent digital media platform in the market, and is the only software to consolidate digital operations across programmatic, direct, search, and social campaigns.

Microsoft Ads is a leading marketing technology solution, providing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Bing, Yahoo! and MSN search engines. Bing powers 36.7% of U.S. desktop searches and 11.7 billion monthly searches around the globe. In the U.S., the Microsoft Search Network has 124 million unique searchers. Basis receives data from Microsoft Ads that is standardized and formatted to match a campaign’s analytics and reporting from other sites, channels, and vendors.

According to April Weeks, Centro’s EVP of media services and operations: “Centro understands marketers. When Microsoft Advertising opportunities are being synchronized with omnichannel efforts, Basis eliminates the extra steps necessary to gather and align data from multiple platforms. Basis provides client teams with a holistic view of how their campaign is performing and highlights the parts that need optimization.”

Microsoft’s integration with Basis empowers users to automate cross-channel campaign management, reduces the time needed to assemble and unify reports, and eliminates manual tasks—without compromising quality and accuracy of data. Basis aggregates and rationalizes delivery data from its proprietary demand-side platform (DSP) and major third-party ad servers, as well as search and social vendors.

Media professionals drive efficiency by unifying reports from different tactics and media seamlessly, within Basis. Then, they evaluate Microsoft Advertising performance with all other ad channels holistically, to make informed campaign optimizations.  Finally, they assess conversions to attribute how Microsoft Ads interactions affected overall campaign engagement.

Most media management systems and ad-buying platforms do not have automatically standardized data being imported via robust API integrations with major third-party ad servers. Basis users do not have to log into third-party systems, locate campaign data, download spreadsheet reports with dozens of line items, and clean up reports to align them with the campaign’s preferred arrangement of data.

Synchronize your search advertising tactics with all major aspects of your campaigns today! Learn more here.

Meet Blue Star Recyclers and learn about their mission!

Over the past year, you have heard Zebra leaders talk about Inclusion and Diversity here on the Your Edge blog. However, most of those discussions were in the context of employee culture. We have yet to talk about the importance of inclusion and diversification in companies’ supply chains. That’s precisely why we invited Steve Williams to join us for the latest episode of the Your Edge podcast.

Find out what Zebra is specifically doing to diversify its supplier base, distribution channel and reseller network and how such efforts enable Zebra to be more creative in delivering the high-quality products and services that give our customers a competitive edge:

Listen to the podcast here!

UI Health, Chicago Medical Society and PhysIQ Collaborate to Protect Frontline COVID-19 Health Care Workers and High-Risk Patients with Advanced AI

• UI Health will monitor the health of certain frontline health care workers and high-risk patients with COVID-19 who are recommended for home isolation using the pinpointIQ system comprising wearable biosensors and artificial intelligence technology
• The system may help mitigate a surge of hospital patients and provide early warning signs of COVID-19 exacerbation

CHICAGO, IL – June 16, 2020 – The University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (UI Health), Chicago Medical Society and AI healthcare tech pioneer physIQ announced today that physIQ’s pinpointIQTM continuous remote patient monitoring (cRPM) system will monitor the vital signs of the health system’s frontline health care workers and high-risk patients with COVID-19 for early signs of disease exacerbation. 

The pinpointIQ system is an FDA-cleared AI analytics platform that monitors the vital signs through a wearable biosensor detecting changes in physiologic indices of health status.  The system then notifies clinicians charged with monitoring data produced by pinpointIQ for clinically-relevant changes in vital signs. This allows an early plan of care to be developed that may prevent complications or hospitalization.

“Our top priority is protecting and promoting the health and safety of our patients and staff, and COVID-19 has created an urgent need for innovative, tech-driven solutions,” said UIC’s Dr. Terry Vanden Hoek, Chief Medical Officer at UI Health and Head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the College of Medicine. “We are excited to partner with the Chicago Medical Society and physIQ to offer home monitoring options to some patients and staff with COVID-19 that could help us detect physiologic changes of illness progression that may indicate a need for early follow up with their physician.”

Through this collaboration, the University of Illinois Hospital will have access to the technology and monitor certain staff and patients with COVID-19 with risk factors such as obesity and heart or lung conditions and who are isolating at home. “Continuous monitoring of patients using physiological modeling with AI offers an opportunity to detect a virus exacerbation early. Early intervention may prevent the body from initiating the ‘cytokine storm’ that we think causes the most severe complications of COVID-19,” Vanden Hoek said. “We hope this technology will help us to closely follow the health of our staff – in partnership with their primary care providers – and patients while they are at home with COVID-19.”

The potential utility of pinpointIQTM for use with COVID-19 patients is supported by the work physIQ has done with USAID, the CDC and Scripps Health in patients with Ebola, as well as in clinical studies conducted with Veterans Affairs in patients with severe congestive heart failure. 

The pinpointIQ system comprises a Vital Connect wearable biosensor, pulse oximeter and smartphone streaming of physiological data to a HIPAA compliant cloud-based server, which uses FDA-cleared analytics to produce clinically actionable insight. For homebound UI Health patients, the system will be prescribed by an emergency room physician and shipped directly to the patient’s home without requiring direct physical contact from a clinician. For health care workers who choose to participate, the system will be deployed at the hospital, through UI Health’s employee health program.

“To make a life-changing impact, we need to be at the front line of health care,” noted Gary Conkright, CEO of physIQ. “We are proud to support homebound healthcare workers and patients who are high risk for COVID-19 exacerbation with our remote physiologic monitoring technology.  This opportunity also allows physIQ to support UI Health in its mission to reduce and eliminate the health disparities experienced by vulnerable communities, which have recently seen disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infection and death due to COVID-19 complications.”

“PhysIQ is alone in offering deep analytics and AI to monitor the health of patients and their healthcare providers,” said Ted Kanellakes, Executive Director for the Chicago Medical Society. “The Chicago Medical Society is proud to support this important collaboration. As a provider to underserved communities, UI Health and physIQ together will make a real difference to the people of Chicago.”

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We all face a challenging market now. A few months ago, no one could’ve predicted the world would be where it is today. Almost all workers need to stay inside and operate remotely. Organizations need to scale up resources to meet this new demand.

But you still have the same concerns you’ve always had with running your business. Organizations were looking to digitize long before this new normal. Fifty-four percent of organizations surveyed for the Flexera 2020 State of Tech Spend Report indicated digital transformation was their top initiative this year.

Organizations also reported cybersecurity and cloud-first/cloud migration as top initiatives. You can see how the need to digitize has increased when looking at the state of the global economy. Cloud is the backbone of digital transformation. Benefits of the cloud for business include enabling organizations to innovate and scale rapidly so they can more quickly to respond to business demand. The trend is for investments in cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to increase as organizations decrease on-premises software license investments.

Eighty-four percent of survey respondents indicated they have a multi-cloud strategy. That is huge in light of the complexity many organizations face as they seek to tighten cloud security and maintain governance. In the midst of all of these rapid changes, organizations have to:

• Identify which workloads to migrate to the cloud
• Develop a strategy for managing multiple cloud instances and services
• Manage hybrid environments
• Advance effective strategies for ongoing management

All these steps need to happen while also controlling costs and finding opportunities to optimize spend. That’s why it’s crucial to approach your cloud journey from a business perspective. You need the right people, processes and tools in place to navigate your cloud journey. For example, you should start by evaluating your business services. With proper service and resource discovery, you can identify which workloads should move to the cloud. That’ll help you avoid the mistake of moving too fast and struggling to get visibility into your IT environment.

As you migrate workloads, you want an effective strategy for managing software licenses and spend in the cloud. This strategy should include looking at SaaS spend, which can quickly proliferate in your environment because of how easy it is to purchase and deploy. You also want to keep a pulse on your IaaS and PaaS spend and leverage automation where appropriate to help you minimize risk. It’s vital to regularly refine your ongoing management strategy based on business demand.

The benefit of the cloud for business is that it provides the flexibility organizations need to scale resources up or down based on need. It’s more necessary than ever to have the capability to examine your cloud strategy. You want to control spend, innovate and respond to business needs quickly and without disruption.

Flexera understands these challenges. We have the automated solutions you need to manage your entire cloud journey. Watch this webinar to learn more about the importance of navigating your cloud journey with a business service lens.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you transform your IT and advance your business.

Need to Get Off on the Right Foot?

Let’s face it; changing up your work routine is no easy feat. Maybe you have already started working from home, or you are looking into switching your employees over to a remote set up. In any case, we developed a helpful guide to be used as a remote work checklist. Let’s get started!  

The In-Office to Remote Work Checklist  

 Computer Set-Up

First things first, when you are transitioning to a remote work setup, you need to make sure your employees have all the technological materials they need to do their jobs successfully. Things such as internet access, laptops, desktop monitors, computer mice, and access to any mandatory programs may be items to consider. 

Your Workspace  

As a remote employee, setting up a workspace and developing a daily routine can significantly improve your productivity and focus. Make sure it’s a space that you can sit comfortably in, not get easily distracted, and feel inspired to work. 

Factor in Time for Complications 

There are bound to be a few speedbumps in the road when you are transitioning to a new work environment. That’s why you should always factor in a “time buffer” with your deadlines and remember to practice patience and understanding with your team members. 

Assessing Your Priorities

A critical part of the remote work checklist is to assess your priorities and make clear guidelines for everyone on what their role is in the company. 

Communication Tools

When you are working from home, communication is key! Using a real-time application for communication is a helpful solution to solve day-to-day issues. We recommend platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack.   

Cybersecurity Protocol

Are your employees properly trained in cybersecurity best practices? One of the biggest cybersecurity threats of working from home is email phishing. If you are not familiar with the term “phishing,” it’s the act of tricking users to click on an encrypted link or email. Once you’ve clicked on the link, the hacker will spam your account with malware or other dangerous viruses. 

 Phishing tests provide your employees with security awareness training. Consider your users as a line of defense in the event of a cyber-attack. 

Annual Meetings

Taking 15 minutes to chat can make all the difference to a remote employee! An important thing to add to your remote work checklist is to schedule regular meeting times with everyone. This ensures your staff is on the same page with all their tasks and encourages team collaboration. 

Task Management 

Don’t let things fall through the cracks! A task management application makes it easy to share and organize your projects, tasks, files, and more. The best part is you can easily share this information with clients and guests, so having an account isn’t necessary. 

Use What You’ve Learned 

Once you have started working from home, the most valuable thing you can add to your remote work checklist is the lessons you’ve learned along the way to make working remote the best it can be.  

Need to get off on the right foot? Let’s face it; changing up your work routine is no easy feat. Maybe you have already started working from home, or you are looking into switching your employees over to a remote set up. In any case, we developed a helpful guide to be used as a remote work checklist.

Click below to review the checklist to take your workplace from in-office to remote work easily.

Originally Posted by EMPIST: https://empist.com/in-office-to-remote-work-checklist/