Robbz: This is the business Tech playbook your source for it. Help for your business. Welcome to the podcast, guys. BJ, I need a tan.
BJ: Well, come on out to Southern California and you can work in my backyard for a couple of days.
Robbz: Sure.
BJ: It would help out quite a bit.
Robbz: I'm in Minnesota. Northern Minnesota at that. And I gotta say, you and I are very different shades. Like we would go to a Sherwin Williams. We would be an entirely different shelf than you. For sure. While you're laughing, I'm your host Rob Zolson.
BJ: I mean, if you go out of your front door and trip, you're in Canada.
Robbz: True.
BJ: I, on the other hand, if I got my door and trip, I'm in Mexico. So we're very opposite sides of the country geographically for sure.
Robbz: And that gentleman that's just speaking right now is BJ Pote of Etop Technologies. Thank you, friend.
BJ: Yeah, for sure.
Robbz: We got each other today. So what are we talking about on this fine podcast?
BJ: Well, honestly, just working in the farm in the backyard. So we're going to dive into how to get a tan. I'm joking. Realistically, we're going to dive into remote work, how it's changed kind of why it started and what is driving some of the importance of it and why.
Robbz: Don'T have to come to California that often.
BJ: And why you don't have to come to California that often.
Robbz: Exactly. I can be here without a tan and not get made fun of.
BJ: Exactly. Well, I mean, if you came to California, you'd have a tan in about a week. I know. I'm going to go into some of the benefits of why we've done remote work and full time remote because it's allowed us to hire people where the amazing people are and not have to go hunting for somebody that's within 20 miles of our office.
Robbz: Well, why don't you start tell us why. Tell us what you did before and why you chose work from home. Because you're a business, a small business, just like we always pick on Brian. But you said we're going to do Bethany. Is that what it is, Brittany?
BJ: Today. It's Brianna.
Robbz: Brianna.
BJ: So we have to go back and forth. So have to be fair in our naming convention.
Robbz: Yeah, you, the listener, are represented by Brianna, the CFO, the person that's managing a business or owns a small business. And we're here to cater to you as the audience. But again, BJ, you own a small business and you were in office and changed to have work at home policies. How did that go? Why did you make the decision and how's it going pre COVID we had.
BJ: One person that was full time work from home because he was in Northern California and we are in Southern California. So similar reasons to why some at different points, over half our team is fully remote. But then obviously COVID happened and all of our full time in house, people went full time remote over one day to the next. And then from that point forward, as I'm sure most of our listeners probably will have experienced, at some level, you had to figure out how to go work from home, develop policies for it, and then now you have. People that are working from home that don't want to come back to the office because they're able to gain back 2 hours of their day because of not having to drive. They don't want to deal with the maintenance on their vehicles. There's a lot of reason that people want work from home. And so now you have to adapt and mature your policies and your processes so that way you can continue attracting really amazing talent. And I know that's what we've done, we had people go full work from home and we had to develop policies. We didn't have a whole lot around it. Now we've made good policies. Our last three hires have been out of state, even though one of them did move from Phoenix to Redlands or one of our team members moved from Phoenix to Redlands. But also it's like, Robbie, you're in Minnesota and we have one of our team members in Texas hire the best people wherever they're at.
Robbz: So they've done a bunch of different surveys. When we had to go from COVID-19 that hit the world to having to push everybody work from home. Once people got established, adapted, and they got their processes done, people see an increase on average, depending on the job, of course, because every job is unique. Of 13% work from home productivity on how they can measure it in any type of KPI. We don't like acronym. Soup help me. Knowledge point indicator.
BJ: Is that key performance?
Robbz: Key performance indicator.
BJ: Wow.
Robbz: See? I'm even terrible with soup. It's the point of measurement for those lists.
BJ: Soup is okay, if you at least know what I mean, right?
Robbz: So you put out an application, you found this guy in Minnesota, and I can't ask for a review here, but I know for me it's been going well. I have gone from working in MSP field where everything's in person, I have to drive to the customers locations, I go into the office. And I changed from not leaving my office at home and supporting Etop's customers. For me, as a change, it's been quite different. And I noticed that moving from one company to the other not only is, in my opinion, etop a bit better than my last company, thank goodness, but my productivity, my productivity. I'm not changing directions continually. I'm not having to address someone at the front door. I'm not having to juggle other distractions. I am focused on the tasks in front of me. And even if I was just a switch in my prior job, I think I would have gotten a big efficiency out of working from home.
BJ: The problem that I think we faced is that when COVID-19 hit in March of 2020, people had to go home because of mandates. People had to go home because of these massive challenges. And it was productivity be darned. Right. It literally was. We're not allowed to have people in our office. As an example, one of our clients, tile distributor, we had been doing a business continuity and disaster plan for them and had been working through rebuilding their networks. That way they could go fully remote. Right. And we were thinking, what happens if their building is gone? Nobody ever thought about the building being there and nobody being allowed in it. We had a pretty fleshed out business continuity disaster recovery plan for them before COVID hit. And then we just ran their dr plan and pushed everyone remote even though the building was fully functioning in there in the last three years.
Robbz: Dr is just disaster recovery for those that thank you. You're welcome.
BJ: We're going to help each other in the last three years, we've had to mature three years ago, it was we had to go work from home to keep people safe. We're kind of over that part now. You're having to mature your KPIs, so those key performance indicators. You're having to mature your tracking so that way you can actually tell if people are doing their job. But to kind of your point, I had one of our other clients, they were tracking what people were doing and they were able to show across the board their business was up 20% for the years that they were fully work from home because they were tracking good numbers. And so if you have good tracking and you have mature metrics, you can easily track how people are doing. And I think that's pretty important for a work from home where it's more about results than it is about just having I like being able to throw a sock at somebody or a book or something. Yeah.
Robbz: So now that COVID is not really mandated, I don't know of anywhere else anymore, I think we can finally say once pizza hut buffet opened, we knew that the whole COVID mandates were over. If I can get all you can eat breadsticks at pizza hut, that's for sure. The stamp in the coffin on this whole thing is COVID. The infection still exists. Sure, absolutely. In the midwest, we got ourselves some delicious pizza hut buffets, and that is how we went and celebrated that COVID was at least the mandates were technically over. So now that this has happened and you have all these workers sorry, I'm.
BJ: Still stuck on the buffet. I didn't know this was a thing.
Robbz: You come up and visit me, my friend. So now that COVID mandates are over, specifically, should you continue working from home or in a business where you didn't have to do abide by those specific mandates? Should you do work from home still? Yes. There's performance increases. Yes. There's, employees are definitely happier having less commute. Instead of driving on the 405, you get to walk down the hall. So that's definitely a benefit for that. But specifically the business, you don't have the cost of having them in a building anymore. You can downsize, you can virtualize. There's so many different options. Even a tech company like Google that has been adamant that they were going to bring people back to work finally has given up because they put in hard mandates. They lost employees and when they did bring them back to the office, they saw the down increase in performance. So if you found that your business can fit this work from home options, this is the podcast episode for you.
BJ: I think we're at the point where it's understanding what works for your business and what works for employees and what works for one employee may not work for another. And I think some roles probably work better in an office space because it's easier to train and kind of see what's going on. I don't know if I would hire a tier one fully remote, personally, not because I don't trust people, but because it's easier to kind of overhear and go, hey, no, that's no, we're going to do it this way. It's easier to coach. You don't have to be as intentional. Do I think it can work? Yeah, absolutely I think it can. But I certainly think there are some roles that still require some physical presence. But then maybe they get a hybrid flex type role. What works best for your business, right? It doesn't have to be a one size fits all.
Robbz: So now that Brianna is listening in the metaphorical CFO, and she's decided, hey, I really want to do some more work at home, maybe it's just for the sole reason of a hiring option. You have a bigger pool of people to access and you want to start at least put your toes in getting into work from home program. Here's the nerd knowledge that you need to get started. So we got to talk about the options of how you're going to do work from home. So I'm going to list a handful of options. Here option one, you send home a user. Maybe you just pick one user to test and that's what we'll do for these options. And you take that user and say, hey, next week we're going to try a work from home program and here's how we're going to do it. So option A, you send them home with a small we call it like a Soho small firewall device. What that device is going to do is going to give you a secure connection. When they plug in this firewall to their Internet, it's going to give them a secure connection, a tunnel from that firewall back to the main office or wherever your servers are at.
BJ: Do they have a computer?
Robbz: Get in there. This is still part of step one. So start with the firewall. So they'll hand you a router looking device and that will give a virtual tunnel from, I'll just say the guide Minnesota me back to Southern California with that whole traffic being encrypted and no one else can see it. So that device allows me to connect as though I was in the office and have a nice stable connection. Then behind it of course, you'd send him with a laptop, maybe a couple of monitors, give him his peripherals like mouse, keyboard, webcam. Webcam is super important in all of these deployments. I would not do a work from home deployment without a webcam. See how it goes, see what issues you're going to walk into. That being step A. Now step B you could do that instead of having the Firewall device, which isn't at an expense, you can do VPN Virtual Private Network. It's a software that does the same thing that that Firewall did. It again makes a tunnel from that computer back to the office, all encrypted as though they were connected in. So they can get to their local files, access anything at the office. Going into more detail, there's this new thing that we could do is also called a Zero Trust client. Can you explain more in detail? BJ sure.
BJ: So Zero Trust is kind of like Cloud right now where it's very buzzwordy and probably overused by a lot of people. But the way we're effectively using Zero Trust is for us. We're using a company called Cloudflare and we're using their Zero Trust Warp client. I know that that doesn't necessarily make that easier to understand. Effectively, instead of us routing traffic from Minnesota to Southern California, we're routing traffic from your local office or your house in Minnesota to Cloudflare. And then Cloudflare scans all your data, all your traffic to make sure it's solid. And if it's just general Internet traffic and you're getting out to all of our tools that don't need Zero Trust, great. It just sends you out to the Internet. But it also makes sure that it's scanning and filtering and it's doing real security work on all of that traffic. But then if it's something that's interesting so you need access to Hudo and it happens to be behind Zero Trust or Grafana, which is one of our dashboarding programs. It'll route you straight to the overzero trust to the right place, and so nobody from the outside can get to Grafana Etop Tech, which happens to be a legit URL or website unless you are behind our Zero Trust.
Robbz: So let's put this into more practical terms. A VPN allows you to have a connection direct from your computer to the office. Good or bad, all traffic is open to the office, your computer, whatever it may be on. If you're just browsing something on YouTube all the way to doing actual business applications all come through that same pipe. If you have a zero trust network. It's like a man in the middle is coordinating and only allowing like a bouncer to a club only allowing certain traffic to go through. So if you're doing something that isn't business approved, it's not necessarily harmful, it just isn't utilizing something back at the office. So if you are looking up a Google result, that guy will say, hey, this doesn't need to go back to Redlands, California. This can go out to the web versus another request that says like you mentioned Hudo, let's say some internal compliance like QuickBooks that is at the local offices. Yep, that one goes down here and only allows what it wants instead of everything.
BJ: Well, and so the other part about Zero Trust is it assumes breach. So it assumes every single device on your network is compromised. And because of that, it's routing all the traffic and scanning all the traffic through the cloudflare servers. And so the more you can kind of work through assuming that everything's compromised, you're going to be a lot less likely to deal with a lateral spread of a threat.
Robbz: Actor we just got a message in the chat. Split tunneling is a good term to use, correct?
BJ: So typically you'll see split tunneling on VPNs but not on a cloudflare Zero Trust kind of thing. You can tell it to not scan certain types of traffic. So in many cases we don't scan like teams or zoom video traffic because it can break stuff. But traffic in our world is called interesting and not interesting. So interesting traffic is something that's going I know, right?
Robbz: I love the term interesting. It's like you have the man in the middle as some kid with Add. Yeah, that's boring off the Internet. That one interests me. I'll take that back to the office. Yeah, I love that.
BJ: Yeah, so yeah, interesting traffic is just traffic that needs to go through a specific tunnel or method such as Zero Trust.
Robbz: So again, method option A, firewall device, like a small firewall, we call them Soho devices. Option B, having some sort of VPN or Zero Trust client that still puts a tunnel from that computer to the office. Or C, just having a remote desktop where the computer that you give them wouldn't have any access to the office, but it would have some sort of tool like Screen Connect or even a Windows remote desktop that would remote into another device such as an actual computer in the office or something on the server.
BJ: We've done this in two different general methods for users at home that only have personal equipment. They generally are always going to have a computer at the office and we set them up with Screen Connect through our system. That could be Team Viewer, this could be please don't use Team Viewer. It could be Screen Connect. It could be splash top. There's a bunch of different remote access tools. A lot of people use even go to my PC, that kind of thing. Or another decent method. Please never use Remote desktop. But you can use remote gateway. It's one of the server plugins. It allows you to have an SSL encrypted. So SSL is secure. Socket layer. It's what the banks use to protect traffic between websites and your computer. But this way you're sending encrypted traffic to that local computer and it still uses the Remote Desktop client. But using standard Remote Desktop is one of the most insecure protocols in the world. So please don't do that without a lot of please just don't do it.
Robbz: Just don't do it. There's really not a lot of good exceptions. It's just not a good thing to do.
BJ: There are no good exceptions in my mind.
Robbz: Right. A, firewall, b, VPN or Zero Trust Client that gives you a tunnel to the office. C, some sort of Remote desktop. Screen Connect is one of the many options we use Screen Connect and D, that we don't recommend in any shape, way, or form, but we still should mention it is bring your own device. Now, bring your own device, just like it says is the employee would use his own computer, something that the company doesn't own, something the company doesn't manage, and you want to do one of the A through C options. Using a personal device is beyond my comprehension for reasons being that, let's say that I own a business. I'm in charge of Apple, Incorporated. And I have not the apple. Well, Apple Job Robbie, Incorporated.
BJ: Oh, okay. Apple, Incorporated. I was going to say, if you work for Apple, can I have a job? Yeah.
Robbz: I got to make up a different fruit. Pair, Incorporated. Damn it. All right. There we go.
BJ: Okay.
Robbz: I'm the owner of Pair Incorporated. I have a couple of employees, and one of them wants to use his own laptop. I would not do that for that heartbeat. It's your data, your intellectual property that's on someone else's device isn't reason one. Anytime that that data lives on someone else, that data technically isn't yours, it's his. If he suffered from the company, it's his. Someone else goes on the computer, maliciously uses it and steals your company data, it's gone. Just for intellectual property reasons is reason one. Reason two is security. If he buys a computer on his own from Walmart, it is not secured. It is putting something rogue on your network that could potentially infect the rest of the office. I'll let you go more in detail. I can already see your face building here BJ.
BJ: So I will say there are very few, in my opinion, good times for Bryod. So this is a big part of why we did Screen Connect, because it's the home users connecting to a central place and then literally just getting kind of an interface to their work computer. All the data stays inside your network. There needs to be nothing installed on the home user's computer because it really limits your exposure. And like as an It company I don't want to touch the home user's computer because it's a big risk to us because if we touch it and then something stops working technically we need to put it back to right yeah now you got to I'm not interested in doing that.
Robbz: You got to put in the money, the effort to repair the machine that wasn't yours, you didn't make the business decision. It's probably a lot slower. Who knows even if someone brings a big gaming machine that's a liability even worse because now you're going to have to deal with all of these not business parts liability people liability underlined.
BJ: So the only time that's pretty much the only use case in my mind for BYOD the other well besides person like phones, if people use their phone like cell phone for office basic office applications, honestly I'm pretty okay with that. Because as long as you force them to use Microsoft Outlook and the Microsoft Tools, you can set up a lot of rules around that. So they can't even take screenshots or download those applications to their phone. And so you're doing like mobile application management and so in my mind that's a pretty low risk if set up properly method for people to do BYOD and so as long as that device is like a mobile device and not a Walmart laptop or their personal computer that's kind of where I personally draw the lines.
Robbz: And even if you have an employee that uses their own phone, most of the companies that we deal with is you can use your phone but it's at your own discretion. You have to use the Outlook app, you have to use the Teams app which we already told you why it's secure but it's at your discretion. You are not required to use your phone and if you want to that's your prerogative. If you are we're asking you to. Most states, or at least a good amount of states have different laws stating that you have to do cell phone reimbursement or you have to outright give them a company phone. So check your local laws and listings on how that works for sure but just to cover yourself mandated you have to have it on the computer. If you want email on your phone, here's how to do it. But it's your prerogative is a great way of handling it.
BJ: Exactly. And so like in our case we give stipends for people that we require to use their phones because we do require for multifactor that people have apps on their phones. It's just for us as a managed service provider being in technology we can't really not do it. There are some companies that can, one of our big manufacturing clients they do UB keys. So just like those multifactor tokens rather than having people have phones and certainly.
Robbz: Check episode one to dive in more detail on this multifactor authentication, why it matters. That's our first core episode for this great episode. So those are the four methods. Definitely don't use the devices. Just a little more deep dive into hardware. So we talked about the use of computer. Always a laptop. Laptop. That way you don't have to have a battery backup. So let's say me in Minnesota, my power goes out. Well, normally in a business office, you'd have an uninterruptible power supply, a battery backup underneath the desk, that's another expense. And they're quite heavy, and maybe you don't want them installing it. Having a laptop helps that if they have a brownout or their power goes out in a quick blip, that their computer actually doesn't shut down. So that's practicality, number one. And two, they're mobile. There might be once a year, a couple of times a year, or maybe this person is an intermediate travel person that you want them to go sell something. Or me and it tech. There might be a day where, hey, everybody's on vacation, I need you to fly to so and so to go take care of this installation just in case their role changes. You don't want to get different hardware for the occasion. Just get them a laptop, don't get them a desktop.
BJ: There are certain areas you want to save money, and when it comes to the right equipment for your employees, that's not the place to save money, in my opinion. Buy people good monitors, because that's what you're staring at. Buy people a good laptop. Spending a few extra dollars there is far less expensive than wasting their time waiting for stuff to work. If you spend a $1,000 if you spend an extra 1000 or $1,500 on a person's home equipment, versus the amount of money that most people get paid on a yearly basis between benefits and the fully loaded, like labor cost, $1,500 is a pretty small drop in the overall bucket.
Robbz: Indeed. So always start with a laptop and then docking station. That way, when they do move, or if they ever move, it's still easier to connect all these peripherals or added peripherals to a docking station using a USB hub. Dell makes them anchor, makes a bunch of products. There's a company, I think, called Plugged In. They're all options to check out. Having everything plugged into a dock ensures that they can just do that one cord unplugged even for charging on your laptop. The monitors, you said good monitors. You can also see and check your manufacturer. Dell offers docks built into the monitor, so all they have is one USB C cord that goes to the laptop and boom, your docking station is the monitor. So you just plug your mouse, your keyboard, your webcam, all of that into the monitor as the hub. Super, super slick. That's actually what you guys set me up with.
BJ: Isn't it awesome? They actually even have network ports built in. So the Dell Hub monitors, they literally, as you said, have all of those bits and network. So you walk in, it's one USBC cable. It's just so clean. And the nicer Dell monitors have really good ergonomics. So they have, like, the nice stands. They can go up and down. You can tilt it. It's small things that give a lot of quality of life, in my personal opinion. Again, spend a little bit more. Those aren't the areas you want to save money.
Robbz: Now, I'm going to take my hat off for a moment and not be an employee of Etop. For this next segment. People ask, what should I provide the employee? I'm going to pretend to put myself in Brianna's position for the company. They say, Should I get them a desk? Should I get them a chair? Should I get them ergonomic, pieces? There are things with unions, there are things with local laws. Check those. But trust me when I say this, the employee is going to be happy enough to provide all of that as long as they have a stable, happy work from home environment. There's not many reasons you should provide those. But again, your company policy, your will you're doing, as long as you're providing them with the other tools for technology. Me, I know when I got the offer. Yeah, absolutely. I'm buying myself a chair. It's all coming out of my pocket. I'm getting a desk. I'm just happy enough to have a good position and then get me really good hardware so I can be successful in my job.
BJ: At the end of the day, it goes back to have a conversation with your team. If somebody needs something, help them figure out how to get it right. For us, it's just try to be generous with people. And I don't know, it's amazing how much that kind of has paid off for us.
Robbz: Now, if you're an employee and you're listening to this and you're trying to convince your boss in doing a work from home program, here's one other added thing that you can consider getting even for yourself. I actually am upstairs in what I would believe to be a very bright room, but I have a window right next to my office, and I am very dark faced in the morning. I'm saying, you should do this when I don't. So forgive me, but consider getting a light bar or a light ring. If you're having morning meetings, if you're talking to people and they just see kind of this dark, hazy office room, you're losing that personal touch for someone seeing you through the camera that you just take for granted. Get a light bar, have someone be able to see you. That window will cut it off and make it look very dark in your office.
BJ: So for us, one of the things that's helped with our work from home is just being cameras on all the time, because it. Very much helps the personality or like it helps people kind of mesh better when it's just all cameras off all the time. I feel like it's easier for people to kind of blend in and not feel as important. I want to know what people I want to be able to see what people are thinking and kind of what's going on in their brains, that kind of thing.
Robbz: It's only fair that if you're going to spend more time because you work a 40 hours week, you're going to work full time. It's only fair that if you spend more time with these people than you, your family, that you should be able to see them and communicate properly. That's a measurement of professionalism, in my opinion. The last thing that we have on the list for how to accomplish work from home is this cool hybrid idea. You want to go into more detail?
BJ: BJ for example, we have one client is 100% work from home, other than probably half a dozen people that work in a very small admin office. But then we have several other clients who are doing like two in the office, three work from home or three in the office, two work from home, that kind of thing. Because being in Southern California, they may only be 20 miles away, but it could be 30, 40, 50 minutes drive each way. They are moving everyone slowly to laptops. They're moving to docking stations in the office. Something that I think is really a nice way of doing things is you can have a number of hot desks. So if you have good monitors, keyboards, mice with a dock at the office, but it's kind of nobody's specific home, I could take my laptop to any of those locations, plug in and work. And so it allows me to even personally have some hybrid approaches at clients offices because they've set these kinds of stations up.
Robbz: Hot desk is a great term.
BJ: Yeah, hot desking is becoming a little bit bigger of a thing where it literally is just you can go grab a desk anywhere that has a setup that nobody's using and just plug in and sit down and work for a couple of hours. This morning I spent 3 hours at a client's office helping them rebuild something. But I was just about as productive there as I was here because I have all my things with me and all I need is internet. Right.
Robbz: One of the examples that I've had in the past is I had an accountant office that I was working with. The accountant office could technically 100% work from home. There's no reason they need to be in an office. So what they did is they downgraded the office. They still wanted to have a single place of business where people could show up in person, have a meeting, drop off their documents, pay a bill, whatever it is. But they didn't have to have the big building with a bunch of cubicles. They didn't have to have that big space in town. They just had to have a small space with one conference room and a front desk. So this company was somewhere around a 45 user company. They all went work from home. The only people left in the office was one office person that there was a hot desk. What did you call that? Hot desk.
BJ: Hot desk, yeah. Be careful what you say here.
Robbz: Yeah, I got to be careful what I say. One hot desk that was in an office. The front desk, which was a hot desk. It still had that docking station and then a conference room. So what they did is they had three employees rotate their days where they had each person in a row would monday Sarah, Tuesday, Brianna, Wednesday Connie, and they would continue just doing a rotate day by day. They would all take a shot because again, they had to drive the 50 miles to get to a couple of them had to drive 50 miles to get there. And it was a hybrid solution and that's how they could completely change their business to move it. It's trying to adapt to what you need.
BJ: Well, and so that was our current biggest client is about a 55 person law firm and they did almost that exact same thing. So they had 20,000 square foot of class A office space here in our town of Redlands. So they had a 16,000 square foot main building and a 4000 foot accounting building that were joined together. And then 2020 happened. And the owner was like everyone's working from home, do I need all this space? It's still working. This is amazing. I love this. So we did a huge project, migrated them over to it seems like the cloud because they literally have people everywhere. They have people all over California. They have several people outside the state. This is why when people say I want to go to the cloud why do you want to go to the cloud? Well, because I want to be able to access it anywhere. Well, there's more than one way to set things up to access anywhere. They then move from 20 something thousand square foot down to a 2000 square foot admin office. And they have a conference center. Like two accounting people work from the office and like two front desk people for mail and printing, that kind of stuff. Outside of that, nobody's there. That place is a ghost town. I haven't done an in person meeting with them in probably two years.
Robbz: You probably won't.
BJ: Yeah, I probably won't do another one with them. Not because I wouldn't like to, but because I just don't need to. And their owner moved out of Redlands and went somewhere else because it was more convenient and it was matched his lifestyle or his family's lifestyle. So they're hybrid.
Robbz: So the most common to continue on. The most common issues that we have people talk about is, well, how can I make phone calls and how do I change my communication? If I needed something, I could just walk down the hall and get Steve from accounting to take care of it for me. Well, number one, calling. You can take your phone home. Phones don't have to be the legacy connections they have. You can have a voiceover, Internet provided phone. They take that physical phone, you plug it in your Internet at home and boom, it's connected. Most people don't even do that anymore. They have soft clients.
BJ: Did we ship you home with a phone?
Robbz: You did not.
BJ: Is there a phone on your desk? I didn't think so.
Robbz: No. Most people don't. They have soft clients. You could download a little app and you have a telephone on your computer, but most of the time now, people are even integrating it with Teams. Microsoft Teams has a phone dialer in it and that's what I use every day. It allows me to handle long distance. People can call my extension, we can transfer it back and forth between each other without having to be in the office. And I can use any headset that's comfortable for me, whether it's Wire list or I want to have some big cups to look like a DJ, whatever's comfortable for that user because you're not going to see me. I'm not pretty, right? That's why I'm a work from home user BJ, to have me turn my camera on once and I go back in the dark corner. You're dying.
BJ: As the owner of the company, I can't respond to that.
Robbz: Hey, you're pretty rob.
BJ: This becomes an HR issue pretty quick. I'm staying out of this.
Robbz: But no, calling is very handy, very easy. Wherever you can open up a computer and plug in your headset, you have a telephone. It's that simple. And if you do want it even more, they have mobile apps, so you can put it on someone's phone and take calls directly on your cell phone if you're driving. And that's just routed to your cell phone that you would have on your own. But again, those are if you're going to use a mobile device, that's more of the policies of, do we pay for the phone? And we talked about that earlier, so I won't rehash.
BJ: And that's why we did Teams calling because it allows us to do all of our intercompany communications and all of our client communications from effectively one app, correct?
Robbz: Right.
BJ: And so if somebody internally gets an email from me, that's more than like a forward FYI or being included in a client communication, somebody's probably in trouble. I don't email our team directly, hardly ever. So for us, Teams is our communication method for I don't text people, I don't email people, I'm Teamsing people or calling people on Team.
Robbz: Right.
BJ: Because it keeps all of my streams of consciousness in kind of one place.
Robbz: So the intercompany communication people said, why can't I go walk down and interrupt Steve? Well, that's kind of where you're getting some efficiencies. If Steve's working and he's not interrupted by your request, because let's get this straight, it's probably lower priority than what Steve's already working on. So he's not immediately interrupted because you barge in his office. So that's probably where this efficiency is coming from. Let's be real. But let's say you still had to get a hold of him. You use that communications app we talked about, microsoft Teams. That's part of the Windows software suite, the 365 suite that comes as part of your email package. Google has their own they have their own messaging client built right in if you want to go through Google workspace. Otherwise there are third party ones that are accepted for business slack. You probably heard about it. That's a big business one that you can use for intercompany communication. It's business controlled and business graded. You can use some more free form ones. I know some people have done Discord. Discord has controls. It wasn't intended for business, but they have multifactor authentication, security, all the goodies to do business if you wanted. There's plenty of them out there. But the point of it is, when you choose one, you can't use others. Everybody has to be on the same team. And though that wasn't a plug for teams but if you're going to use.
BJ: One, we should use teams.
Robbz: Yeah, if you're going to use one, don't use others. Everybody has to be in the same spot, and you have to be responsive. If someone messaging you, finish your task and respond to it as though it was a text message is how I used to train people in. If you get a text message from someone, how urgent is it? Well, I'm going to finish what I'm doing and then respond when it's convenient for me. If someone needs me more urgent than me messaging them in teams, they can call me. That's how I deal with it. That way we're not walking into Steve's office, and Steve understands that if he gets a phone call, it's probably urgent and he should pick it up. That should be established in how you escalate urgency in this communication process. And then when you do use cameras, if you're going to make a phone call, say hi, do a wave, even if you're not that outgoing person and you're a complete introvert, it really does help build that relationship. I know it sounds stupid, but again, you're spending more time with these people than your own family. At least be professional and throw up a camera.
BJ: Camaraderie is important. That teamwork is important. I absolutely agree. There something you said that I thought was interesting was having a policy around it. And I do agree that's something we've worked on quite a bit, even just like the calling and the communication we're starting to have policies for everything. Go figure. And maybe it's less policy and more process, whether it's for work from home or the communication around working from home. A lot of that has to do with what I said at the beginning, where working from home is having to mature and you're having to more fully build out. How do you measure results? How do you measure what people are doing? Do you have good policies around it? Are people following the policies? Are you inspecting what you expect?
Robbz: Reason why you should have a policy is to establish the rules. They've never worked from home or possibly have never worked from home. And there's a lot of things that other companies may not be as mature as you. And stating it out doesn't give any gap of what you believe is common sense. So paint it out. Even though it sounds dumb, painting it out, it really does help some things. And we can make a document and publish this in our show notes of some not a template, but some things that you can consider putting in your own policies. I'll go through the list here we're using. Some of ours is treat that office in your house as though it's not part of your own house. When you walk into that office, you just walked into your business. In my situation, I just walked into Etop Technologies. I sat down with my cup of coffee and I am not in my house anymore. I treat it as though I'm virtually in California. Be respectful, come in dressed. So when you do see someone on camera, you're not looking like your hair is in a mess and you kind of just half showed up or just rolled out of bed. Treat it like a real company. And to start off with policies, make sure that you're the only one using that device. The company was nice enough to let you work from home, get you hardware, get you all set up. Make sure that's only used from work. And in an area where especially if you're in a healthcare field or a lawyer field or accountant field, where there's private data, personal data that the company owns, no one else sees that, have it behind a closed door, keep it away from your family. Not that your family is a sort of risk. It's professionalism and respect to the company that's employing you completely.
BJ: And I think that's why you see a lot of people kind of scared of work from home because they're afraid that it's going to be taken advantage of. Everyone's worried about getting taken advantage of. Employees are worried about getting taken advantage of by their employer. Employers are worried about worried about getting taken advantage of by their employees. Let's all figure out how to show up and be adults and kind of make it work because it's here to stay. Let's make it work for everyone.
Robbz: Now, some people are concerned when you send work from home that they're not going to respect the equipment. Keep that stuff in the office again, keep it as though that that's a different building in your home. And that's now, like I'm going to say, I'm going to put it this way, because I work for Etop. It's now Etop's building and respect it as such and remember that that is their property in your home. Treat it as such. People think that, oh, I'm going to send them work from home. They're going to be harder on the equipment. Most of the time it's not the case, but know that you should just respect it as though you were in the office. If you have a mouse getting thrown around, are you really treating that office like you were in the office? So be respectful of your equipment. And one of the underlines that I like here is I'm going to read it verbatim. Remote work isn't a substitute for dependent care. Core work hours can't be used for this purpose immediately. People think, hey, I can work from home. Great. I can be here while my kids are. Yeah, that's not work hours. That's continually distracted and that's being disrespectful. Would you bring your kid into the office every day and have to deal with a crying two year old in the corner while you're pretending to be a professional in the office? No. Treat it again as though you were in the building. Have daycare.
BJ: I think so much of this goes back to just being treating people like they're human and recognizing that things happen. Right. It's one thing if that happens. Sometimes, it just needs to not be every day. So there's no one path forward on a lot of this stuff and it needs to work. Be what works best for the company and what works best for the team member.
Robbz: I guarantee you give and take that if I was in California and I had an issue where I had to bring my kid in for a little bit, once in a blue moon, once a year, once every six months because a real family emergency happened, you'd understand and that would be applicable. But I would definitely be respectful enough to set up daycare. So I don't do that every day or hardly ever. If ever would be the goal, if ever.
BJ: And that's it. The goal would be to kind of minimize it and treat it like you are in the office. Yeah. Would you want to kind of work through wrapping up with security?
Robbz: Did you have any others that you should add to at least a generic recommended policy?
BJ: Honestly, let's just post a link to what we've already made the recommended work from home policy. That way people can have something that they can work through. Please has your legal team check this out. Don't take what we said verbatim. We have everything we do reviewed regardless. I'm not going to trust our words without having it reviewed by a legal team.
Robbz: The policy that we have in the show notes is going to be more of the common sense, not the legalese that you're going to have to have for HR conversations. Security wrap up again, treating it like at the office, having a closed door where people can't see it, people can't access the device physically. And another good tip is if that person is allowed to work elsewhere, for instance, more common sense. And this is part of security that I would consider. I want to go work from Starbucks for the day because I'm going crazy. I tell my boss, hey, is it okay if I do it and I establish that? Is that a secure place? Make a judgment call according to what the business requires. If you're a HIPAA certified, it's probably not going to be an option. You can't have someone in the background of a coffee shop see HIPAA protected material on your computer screen. But other jobs, if you're in a sales job and you got permission from your boss, great. I would definitely use some common sense. And anytime that you want to transition away from the one office they've already approved, to always communicate that with your direct manager to make sure that they know what's going on or have that pre communicated, if that's part of your job. If you're a salesperson that works from home because you're remote and you're traveling, they already know that the information that you're going to be DNA is going to be done in a hotel Starbucks. Just make sure that they explicitly know that either one, you have permission to do that, or you've already communicated it.
BJ: That's a really good point, and I think it also depends, it very much in my mind, depends kind of on the role. So if we're doing development, if we're doing I couldn't do a podcast at Starbucks, but I spent 3 hours of my day yesterday at Starbucks because I really just needed to not be here. Work from home for me is hard because I have a three year old and a six year old, so I don't work from home, and that's personally why. But I had been at the office all week and I was going crazy and I desperately needed to just go somewhere else and sit. So I went and worked at Starbucks for two and a half, 3 hours. But I was working up on my sales pieces, I was working on content, I wasn't doing remote support. So it works for me at that point. But if you're dealing with a lot of customer interactions, it just becomes a lot harder.
Robbz: What else you got for security? We have all different types of security tips just for business in general, but specifically for those that work at home.
BJ: Specifically when it comes from work from home. This is a big part of why we really recommend people having company equipment, because then they have the full suite of security tools on that endpoint, and that provides a lot of protection. So if you're using a work from home personal computer, I'm not going to install all of our security tools on it because, again, I don't want to mess up their home computer. So the biggest piece in my mind of security is making sure they're running the company owned equipment with all of the proper tooling from your company to provide that security.
Robbz: I want to poke one more step at doing an extra layer of multifactor authentication work at home. That's one thing. It's in your office. Your house is locked when you're gone. It's a liability that that piece of equipment is already not in the company office. But if you're a mobile employee, consider having multifactor authentication of even a fingerprint scanner. I find that that not only is convenient for a person that has a fingerprint scanner on their laptop or can request an extra one, but that just adds that extra level of security where even if your kid watches you, because they're smart. My two year old, if I could sit down in front of her with a calculator, I put one five, four. She'll do it like Simon says. So if they're watching you type in a pin number, they can't beat your fingerprint scanner just in case for some reason that office door got cracked open, the kid walks in there and then types in your password that they've noticed.
BJ: So this is one thing that we've been working on internally, and we're about to roll out to all of our customers is something called Windows Hello for business, where it effectively allows us to log into computers with, like you said, the fingerprint scanner. Most of the Dell laptops for I see out there these days, the power button is also a fingerprint scanner. You can then also use the windows. Hello, face scan. When I log into my laptop, I can use the face scanning. And then also one of the main login features we're seeing around password lists is it throws up that number on your screen. You have to enter 90 into your cell phone, and then you have to use Face ID because I use an iPhone. Like, I'll log into the Microsoft Authenticator app, type in 90, and it logs in my computer. So your kid would have to have your face, your finger, your phone. They would have to have something that's always with you versus having just a strict password. So that's a really good point. I recommend that at the office, too.
Robbz: It's nice at the office, but it's still less of a concern from little wandering eyes that might sneak in your office.
BJ: Another little wandering eyes at most offices. Let's be honest.
Robbz: Yeah, let's be honest. One other one that's kind of practical security is people on the phone, they hear stuff in the background and they can get nervous, especially talking to a company that deals with sensitive issues or sensitive matters. My own mother is a work at home employee, and she receives phone calls that in distress different companies, even some of the more serious medical hotlines. And she installed extra padding in her office just to make sure that it's more soundproof, not for necessarily what you're saying, but be aware of who's in your house, but more of distractions of if they hear TV in the background from another room, if they hear kids running down the hall. People understand that you have kids and responsibilities, but doing as much as you can to Mitigate to keep that call private and personal in your office is a level of just practicality, but also security for the information.
BJ: Agreed. And I think it comes down to what you're handling and kind of what the requirements of the employer are.
Robbz: Now, the other benefits, since we're done kind of with a little security wrap up, unless you got something else.
BJ: BJ I'm starting to run out of the steam here.
Robbz: Now that you're all alone, no one sees you, you're working at home. Yes, you can kick your feet up on your own desk if you're not hurting company equipment. You can make sure to wear shorts since no one's going to see you on your bottom half. You can even get away with having your own nicotine level in your own office if that's something that you prefer, but just make sure that none of it is imperfectional. But, I mean, you're going to have.
BJ: Your pets underneath your feet so you have a doggo that you can pet.
Robbz: Enjoy those comforts. Just because you're treating it like an office doesn't mean that if dog slips in, no one's going to see, you know what I'm saying?
BJ: And like somebody said, you can microwave that fish in the microwave and nobody cares. Whereas if it's at the office and you microwave fish, everyone's going to be like putting up a sign that says no microwaving fish. One of the things that I appreciate about work from home, so even our people that are local are allowed to work from home most of the time. But it was one of the best ways we could give hire the best talent wherever they were. It gives people a really decent sized raise because the amount it costs to drive in Southern California is pretty high. And so it's finding ways to give benefits to your team that involve them working from a place that they are most comfortable, and that's been really good for us.
Robbz: BJ I'm going to confess to you right now, I have not worn pants since getting hired at E Top.
BJ: I'm wearing shorts and on that summer short bombshell.
Robbz: Summer shorts. See, you never knew. You never knew.
BJ: I think you've told me that before, but I drew at a point of like, these are things that I don't need to know.
Robbz: You're welcome. That's what we're here for. Well, guys, if you like what you hear, certainly subscribe. Check out the show notes. If you got questions, we got an email. And Discord. We had Discord Actually linked at the bottom of the website businesstechplaybook.com. BJ got any other notes if you.
BJ: Could like and give us a five star review we'd love that. Really helps with getting this out there. So if you got value, go ahead and share it with somebody that you know. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen. We know your time is valuable.
Robbz: Until next time. Maybe I'll put on pants.
BJ: I doubt it.