How Redundant Remote Working Tech Can Be Used To Improve Office HR And Engagement

Redundant is one of those slippery words that must be fielded very carefully lest you give the wrong impression. In most instances, it’s used to mean something no longer being necessary or even useful: something redundant can be removed from the equation without causing any problems. If an acquaintance were to tell you with tears in their eyes that they’d been made redundant, you’d have every reason to fetch them a beverage and express your sympathies.

Confusingly, though, that’s not all it means. Within the context of technology and business processes, there’s another meaning entirely that concerns being more than is strictly required in a good way. This kind of redundancy is akin to packing more than you expect to need for a trip. You may not need some of the things in your rucksack, but if you do, you have them.

So when we talk about redundant remote working tech here, we’re not talking about obsolete applications. We’re talking about tech arrangements with built-in excess: remote setups that have more power, configurability and reliability than most people will typically need, capable of handling whatever you throw at them without relying on particular office arrangements. They work whether you’re fully remote, always in the office, or using a hybrid approach.

A company with this kind of approach will remain perfectly positioned to excel no matter what happens with office spaces. But enough preamble concerning semantics and working styles. Let’s get to some key pointers for how you can use redundant remote cloud-based working tech to bolster your office HR and engagement, shall we?

HR portals can make leave so much easier to manage

It’s historically been perfectly workable for the core matter of annual leave (or sick leave, for that matter) to be handled manually. It’s simple enough, naturally: checking allowances, monitoring schedules, and ensuring that everything is tied up neatly to avoid greatly inconveniencing the company. There’s a slight problem, though: it’s fundamentally awkward.

Depending on the company, the implicit pressure to stand out through working hard and putting in extra time can be substantial. This can lead employees to feel uncomfortable asking for time off, expecting their supervisors to think less of them because of it and possibly question them as though wanting to take provided leave is somehow abnormal. The result? Leave days gathering dust, and productivity dropping due to low morale.

This is a big reason why HR portals like BambooHR are so valuable. Capable of tracking and approving leave automatically based on various factors (even though most companies include manual sign-off as a safety measure), a great HR portal can reduce the stigma involved with requesting leave. That’s not all it can do, of course: it can also distribute employee surveys and aggregate results to update management on what can be done to improve things.

And since HR portals are mostly automated, they can process any and all requests submitted to them extremely promptly. There’s no lag stemming from a lynchpin employee having to slowly get through a backlog. Managers and department heads also end up happier since they have to deal with fewer administrative tasks (and can learn from anonymous survey responses instead of navigating difficult conversations with dissatisfied team members).

Dynamic video chat systems can boost meeting standards

Meetings can be frustrating and tedious, but they’re also necessary on a frequent basis. The problem with remote meetings is that they’re… Inadequate. Options like Zoom and Google Meet aren’t bad (indeed, they’re robustly functional), but they aren’t good for engagement because they’re dry, clunky, and feel highly artificial. Conversations don’t work that way. The beauty of an office meeting is that ad-hoc exchanges can pop up, encouraging creativity.

The exciting thing about remote meeting tech, though, is that it’s improving at a rapid clip. This is evidenced by the growth of dynamic video chat systems that take the basic Zoom-type formula and iterate upon it in some key ways. Consider an approach like Topia’s spatial video chat: you can build a basic digital landscape, populate it with users, and have each user’s conversation partners determined by how close they are to other users in that landscape.

In other words, if you want to have a private conversation with another user, you can walk your avatar over to theirs. It isn’t quite the same as having a real-world discussion, but it feels much more natural, and is vastly more engaging for things like employee onboarding. Instead of being made the absolute focus of attention, a new hire can simply be invited to a casual gathering, allowed to form conversations when they want to (or just listen and learn if they don’t).

Automated training tools can keep employees learning

A key part of HR is ensuring that employees feel broadly satisfied in their positions. Stagnation is all too easy, after all: someone initially happy in their role can lose motivation after months or years of doing the same things. This is where training becomes so important. Even if their roles don’t change (or change very slowly), having opportunities to develop their skills can engender sufficient comfort to keep employees around for the long haul.

Classic in-office training sessions have always left much to be desired. Often overly long, fragmented, and outright dull, they don’t improve because employees feel pressured to comment positively. Part of this stems from a reluctance to seem ungrateful. The result is that so much traditional training time has always been ineffective. So can remote working tech improve upon this? Inarguably — and efficiently to boot.

A Learning Management System (or LMS for short) can radically overhaul how a company handles internal training, taking provided course materials — whether in-hours or outsourced — and fitting them into trackable automated workloads that learners can go through at their own pace. Platforms like TalentLMS have free tiers that allow you to freely experiment with them before deciding whether you’re willing to pay for additional features.

Elements of gamification in your training system will make it more enjoyable, and being able to take quizzes and make progress from their smartphones will leave team members much more likely to participate enthusiastically. You can even get seasoned employees involved in course creation as a way to facilitate creativity and draw upon their expertise.

Cloud software in general can enhance accessibility

Everything we’ve been talking about here involves cloud computing: processing things using computing resources accessed through the internet instead of handling them locally. This bears highlighting for two big reasons. Firstly, the nature of the cloud is the greatest provider of redundancy you could imagine: cloud systems are near-infinitely scalable, meaning that additional resources are always available if you need them.

You’ll never run into the difficult situation of finding that your remote working system can’t handle a vital task. The cloud offers far more power, more speed, and more reliability. It has more of everything. It’s tech redundancy taken to the Nth degree. But what about the second reason? Well, that comes down to accessibility. Another part of HR is helping employees to be comfortable and work in the conditions they prefer, and the cloud makes that possible.

The more of your remote working setup stays in the cloud, the less it matters what devices people use to access your systems. When all the processing is remote, you can use a basic Chromebook and still get things done at an acceptable pace. Or maybe someone would like to do some work from their smartphone while on a trip. With a fully-secured cloud system, they can. And if a work device is lost, data won’t go with it. It’s merely a conduit, after all.