The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organizations around the world to digitize their workforces. As the pandemic continues and remote work becomes the new norm for many organizations, leaders who fail to effectively transition into the digital realm may struggle. However, there are steps they can take to adopt the increasingly digital workspace and become digitally savvy leaders.

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Anyone can appreciate the value of a service level agreement (SLA), especially in the context of a customer-provider relationship. It’s virtually unthinkable to offer any kind of service without also providing contract details for customers.

Take cable or cell phone service, for example. As consumers, we sign on the dotted line to acknowledge our understanding of what will be provided in exchange for our monthly payments, and we look to that agreement to shape our expectations for the customer-provider relationship.

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As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep across the globe, professionals in nearly every industry have been forced to work from home in order to follow social distancing best practices.

If you're a salesperson, this working arrangement has probably been a tough transition—making sales calls from your kitchen table while the kids fight over the remote in the living room isn't what we'd call an ideal work environment.

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Many accounting and finance organizations have been forced to close their physical offices and conduct work remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and these companies have had to come up with new ways of hiring staff. In particular, they’ve moved their recruitment and onboarding processes into the virtual world, from a candidate’s initial interview—now via video—to their first day on the job—now from home. The crisis has provided a fresh perspective on the idea that remote recruitment could become common and perhaps even standard in some cases.

Managers need to be ready to address immediate staffing needs and those in the longer-term future, despite not fully knowing what the latter might look like. And since a virtual hiring process could play a bigger part in recruitment now and down the line, it pays to be prepared.

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The Census Bureau reports that 36.9% of surveyed adults in the United States switched to remote work in some form, for at least part of their employment hours, during the pandemic. This shift to remote work affected so many and kicked off a number of changes to how we approach work and our daily lives. Some of these changes are here to stay and may even inspire trends for years to come.

Here are the top work from home trends to keep an eye on now and into the future.

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It's been 18 months since the pandemic sent my team home from the office, which is now a permanent situation for many sales reps and managers in our industry. As a sales manager, the biggest challenge has been maintaining the same team culture we enjoyed pre-pandemic when you had daily face-to-face interactions and social outings to build camaraderie.

Currently, I have an entire team full of engaged and productive reps who express overall satisfaction and happiness with their job, a job that is incredibly challenging but financially rewarding. The key is to hire skilled talent and ensure they fit well with the company and team culture.

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Last year saw a surge in cybercrime exploiting the various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote work, with ransomware attacks soaring by 150%.1 The Thales survey found the pandemic’s effects have had a significant impact on security infrastructure, particularly on access management and authentication frameworks, pushing organisations to adopt modern security strategies like Zero Trust to support the demands of a more mobile and remote workforce.

Read the full article at: www.businesswire.com

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, an estimated 16 million U.S. knowledge workers shifted to working remotely, according to Slack. COVID-19 effectively ushered in a change that many predicted years ago: a world where remote work is prevalent. This was unprecedented and likely would not have been possible on such a massive scale as few as 10 years ago.

A Remote Work Future

Although most companies that made the shift to remote work assumed it would be temporary, many are seeing business continue and their employees remaining productive, with some organizations reporting productivity increases of up to 30%. Many employers have realized that when their teams are equipped with the right tools, they can remain productive regardless of where they work. Benefits of a remote workforce include real estate cost savings, reduced commute times, fewer office distractions, and flexibility for employees.

It seems the remote workforces that were predicted years ago are clearly here to stay. Many large technology companies are offering employees the option to work remotely indefinitely, and 98% of respondents to a recent Buffer survey indicated a desire to continue working remotely, at least a portion of the time, for the remainder of their career.

While we’re fortunate that technology advances enabled this incredible transition, with change comes new challenges, not the least of which is hiring remotely.

Navigating Remote Hiring

Embracing remote workforces leads us to reconsider hiring processes. A certain level of trust and connection is established when you interact with someone face-to-face. When in-person meetings are not part of the hiring process, we no longer have the luxury of reading subtle cues, such as body language and voice inflection. Video interviews can mitigate this to a degree, but we’ve all been in situations in which we felt differently about a person during a video call compared with when we interacted with him or her face-to-face.

This highlights an important issue that takes on new importance with the increase in remote hiring: How do you know the people you’re interviewing are who they say they are? While most people don’t lie about their identities or falsify details on their résumés, it happens more than you think.

According to a Resume Lab survey, more than a third of respondents (36%) admitted to lying on their résumé. A recent high-profile case of this was reported in December 2019 when it was discovered that a woman lied on her résumé, used a photo of Kate Upton as her LinkedIn photo, and landed a $185,000/year government job in Australia. Her deception included lying about education and employment and even posing as a previous employer to provide a reference and review about her own performance.

Deceptions like this have been occurring even before the crisis, even in face-to-face hiring situations. In the end, do you really know people are who they say they are? Do you know whether those individuals have brought in their own, untampered identity documents on their first day of work to complete the I-9 process? Were the documents they presented the same as those that went through the background check process? Are your HR professionals trained to detect discrepancies?

For most companies, the short answer is no. These are all important questions to ask, particularly when operationalizing remote hiring practices.

Trust matters, especially when hiring someone you won’t be regularly interacting with in person. You need to trust the identities of employees joining your company, but it goes beyond that. Your new hires need to trust that you do your due diligence when vetting candidates, and the rest of your employees need to trust that you’re bringing someone into the company who has been thoroughly vetted. Safer workplaces, remote or otherwise, start with identity verification.

Expanding the HR Toolkit with Identity Verification

Identity verification helps the HR world evolve with the times and helps companies gain confidence in the identity of the people joining their teams—whether they sit hundreds of miles away or will work side by side in a physical workplace with your other employees, now or in the future.

Here’s how identity verification works: Using their smartphone, candidates snap a photo of their identity document, such as a driver’s license or passport, which is evaluated to ensure it hasn’t been tampered with or altered in any way. They then snap a selfie, and a process commonly known as a liveness test verifies that they took a photo of a live person (versus a photo). The selfie is then compared with the photo on their identity document. It’s that simple and takes only a couple of minutes, yet it’s a crucial step.

You don’t want to waste your time going through an interview process with someone who is lying about his or her identity. And you certainly don’t want to wait until after a candidate has joined your company to verify the person’s identity.