COVID And Your Company's Culture: What Now?

By Knox Hutchinson, CBT Nuggets Trainer

Forget about your clients for just a moment and focus on this question: How ready was your firm for COVID-19 quarantine?

Some of you who were reading will say that you had a little bit of an adjustment, while others may say it was a paradigm shift, but we can all agree that the technical challenges brought about by this change weren’t as daunting as the culture shift. We’re lucky in the sense that IT professionals are more equipped to work remotely than many other professionals, but even the “most IT” of us all still are wrestling with the new norm.

Now consider that many of your clients aren’t in the IT profession, and this combined technical and cultural change has been a lot more stressful for them. That’s why they hired you, after all, to help them navigate these crazy times. Again, the IT Industry has been lucky. The cloud has matured to the point where quickly enabling remote collaboration was a possibility.

Could you imagine sitting down with a client without SaaS collaboration offerings like Microsoft Teams, Slack, WebEx, Zoom, etc., and the risks associated with workers performing their work without partitions? Imagine being a systems admin working on the same home desktop computer on which your kids downloaded bootleg video games.

In such a hectic time, the essential thing that you can do right now for your clients is to express genuine empathy. While their demands have increased because of their need for technology quadrupling overnight, so have their stress levels. As a dedicated IT Consultant, you are in a unique position to be the people they can depend on right now. Circling back to the initial question - how ready was your firm for this change?

You also can adapt many of the transitional implementations you’ve made in your firm for your clients. Thinking innovatively about how to securely leverage SaaS offerings, cloud infrastructure offerings, branch office SoHo firewalls, and the like aren’t just solutions for IT firms - they are solutions to be leveraged by every industry. Consider more frequent check-ups with your clients during this time and pitch the tools and practices that worked out well for your team — even the experimental ones.

These regular checkups with your clients (and your internal team) will get you through the status quo, but the day will come when it is time to return to the office. That day may be up to you, or a client may impose it. It’s not too early to start thinking about how the transition will look. Meet with clients to set expectations now about what should permanently change and revert to how it was.

For many businesses, allowing users to maintain ongoing remote work will be standard, so how does that impact desktop infrastructure budgets and licensing? How will shipping hardware to the client work? How will offsite backups of user data be handled? Even something as sensitive as deep packet inspections from that SoHo firewall while home user traffic is traversing can be uncomfortable. So while the temptation might be to focus on just getting through today, keep your eyes set on tomorrow.

About The Author

Knox Hutchinson is a trainer at CBT Nuggets whose areas of expertise include data analysis and visualization and business intelligence solutions. His certifications include Microsoft MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, Microsoft MCP: Administering SQL Server 2012/2014 Databases, Cisco DevNet Professional, Cisco CCNP: Enterprise, Certified Meraki Network Operator (CMNO), JNCIA-JUNOS, JNCIA-DevOps, Tableau Desktop Qualified Associate, and CompTIA Network+.