We recently interviewed Trevor Greene of SiteTech Systems, a diversified consulting, research, and analytics company (serving banks, credit unions, developers, home builders, realtors, and government entities), to understand how ActivTrak helped SiteTech Systems quickly transition to a remote workforce without disruption to client service during COVID-19.
Q: The recent government shelter-in-place directives have required businesses to rapidly transition to a remote workforce, sometimes with as little as 1-2 days’ notice. At what point did you make that move and how did you roll it out?
A: We’ve always toyed with the idea of having a remote work option. But going from offering people a few floating days a year to managing 30+ employees “offsite” is a big shift. As the impact of the virus started to spread, we switched into survival mode to get ahead of it. And being proactive was a really smart decision. Given the context, employees appreciated the option to work from home and understood that doing so would require us to establish some basic operational policies to ensure business continuity and customer service.
Q: What remote work issues were you most concerned about?
A: We provide research and analytics to banks, credit unions, appraisers, developers, home builders, realtors, and government entities. As a consultancy, it’s really important that we manage and track our time efficiently, effectively, and accurately. But with more than 1-2 people submitting logs remotely, that’s just not feasible. Our challenge was to maintain productivity while giving employees the flexibility they need to feel safe and secure working remotely. And we got really lucky in finding ActivTrak to help us do that.
Q: How did ActivTrak help you implement your remote workforce plan?
A: We looked at ActivTrak and one other solution. ActivTrak stood out for its ability to reconcile time logs across lots of people, and for its ability to drill down on productivity data to provide additional color. There’s a lot of variance in the work we do, so gleaning that additional context isn’t easy — and was a huge bonus. ActivTrak checked all the boxes we needed and many more. We started our ActivTrak pilot on a Monday, and by the end of the week we were fully deployed (and it only took 20 secs per employee desktop). We didn’t even get IT involved.
Q: What has surprised you most about your remote workforce rollout?
A: I’ve been extremely surprised at how productive everyone has been. I frankly expected some sort of learning curve, but they’re all killing it right now. One thing we love is the ActivTrak USB detection function. Not many people do what we do in this space so protecting our IP is critical; the last thing we want is for someone to download a sensitive file and sell it to a competitor.
Q: It sounds like a really positive experience so far. Where will you go from here?
A: We’re a very tech savvy company — always trying to make things work faster and smarter. While the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a case study no one asked for, it has been a really good experience in learning how people can be productive in remote environments, and what kinds of tools we can give them to be even more so.
We’ve got a very young workforce. Remote work is what they like and want — and they’re pretty good at it. I’m 100% confident that if we decide to embrace remote work on a more permanent basis (not to mention less office space and less overhead) that we’ll be able to do so first and foremost because ActivTrak.
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