If you’re anything like us, you’ve lost at least a little sleep over work stuff in the last year. Pretty much everyone who was working in an office setting since this all started has experienced some degree of change in their work schedule, whether it was transitioning to fully remote for a period or doing half-in-half-out office schedules. Before all this, working from home was kind of the dream – but once we all started doing it the problems started cropping up immediately.
Work From Home Woes
1. Data Security
For us, we knew our remote sales team needed a certain level of data protection/security from the start to protect sensitive customer information, so using our personal ISPs was out of the question.
We opted to set them up with devices that could create a VPN that takes advantage of their ISP network with a safe data tunnel to encrypt their data at its origin and destination.
2. Connection Loss
So about two weeks into our WFH, we started running into problems with consistent connectivity. Around 2PM when the high school buses drop off, some of our suburban teammates were experiences massive bandwidth drop-offs, if not being totally bumped off for mixed lengths of time. For those of us that didn’t need the VPN, we set up devices that had dual-carrier capability. That allowed any network drops to just be seamlessly picked up by either Verizon or ATT, whichever the device detected to be faster (automatically, I might add).
3. Wireless/Wi-Fi
Okay, I’ll be honest – this one is kind of an unintentional benefit. When I’m tired of being in my house, I take my modem and laptop and drive to the beach or to the park (during the weekdays I can always find a nice, secluded spot away from others). I plug the modem into my jeep and set up my pillows and blankets, sit under an umbrella or some other shade. I connect to the wi-fi broadcast from the modem and enjoy work in my new outdoor pop-up office. If that doesn’t sell you, nothing will.
Want to Learn More?
If you want to learn more about how WFH with a modem works (trust us, it helps to know some of the technical stuff when you pitch it to your boss), we partnered with Sierra Wireless on an informational webinar. It explains how the technology protects you and your productivity and talks about some devices that will work in different scenarios.