KnowledgebasePart 3 of 4. This is a video by Jim Browning, who is doing an amazing job tracking down scammers overseas, mainly in India. Watch this amazing video, then subscribe to Jim’s channel and help to support him using his Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/JimBrowning.
By Jon Gillham, Edited by AL Harlow
If you are looking for a solution on how to manage staff remotely for the first time or looking to improve your current systems, this article will help show you how based on actual experience.
Recently, due to the Coronavirus, organizations and businesses need to know how to best manage their staff as they begin working remotely.
My hope is that I can help contribute to the current situation by essentially open-sourcing all of our procedures for effective remote work.
My team has been managing 50-100+ full-time employees, part-time employees, and contract team members working remotely for years. We have had some incredible system failures and also some huge wins with managing remote staff. Overall, we have managed almost 200,000 hours of remote workers on one platform alone.
This has all been done by working remotely on one platform. Here are all of our systems to help you get set up to be effective with remote workers!
In this article, I’m going to lay out how we work by breaking it down into 3 parts.
ONE – Tools: What tools are needed or optional to manage remote workers efficiently and increase productivity.
TWO – Setup: How do you get remote workers set up and excited about the system
THREE – Ongoing Communication Cadence: A system is useless if it isn’t used
I picture this being the most useful for a manager/leader that is taking a semi-remote team of 3-15, that work off of a laptop, communicates via email, typically sitting beside one another, to… a fully remote team, no longer in the office. If a more helpful guide surfaces, I will be sure to try and reference it for additional reading.
Please feel free to share and comment so we can try to help as many virtual teams get over the hurdle of remote work.
These are the tools we use.
NOTE – Many of these tools have made special pricing accommodations during the coronavirus pandemic to help facilitate remote work.
Security & Password Sharing:
Documents:
Communication:
Recruiting:
Time Tracking:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/oRn4IUOGJdY
Other (used on specific projects)
This can be the most daunting part of getting remote staff working and managing them effectively, especially if your staff is located within different time zones.
I will do my best to recommend the sequence of getting things set up so it doesn’t disrupt your company culture.
Change Management Warning: Managing this much change for someone can be challenging, so below will outline the order of adoption that I would recommend.
Getting set up on Slack or a similar team chat solution is a great first step.
BUT, if you don’t plan or put some thought into the onboarding process, then it can turn into chaos.
Below is the email I sent to the team to communicate how we are going to transition to and start using Slack. In the end, the transition was successful and people really took to it vs a standard email.
Hi Team
Slack will become the new standard team internal communication tool – late to the party but now is the right time.
Objective – Streamline communication across all people and all projects in the organization resulting in improved productivity, communication, and culture.
Good References:
Case for Action – As we have more people overlapping between projects and working remote, it becomes more important for us to have standard methods of communication. On any day I might communicate with people using… email (one of 3 different logins), telegram, in person, google chat, skype and text msg. This is a problem with others as well working on multiple projects. Slack will not completely fix the problem but will help.
Actions Items for All:
What is Slack?
Slack is made up of channels and is essentially a group chat.
How Will We Use Slack?
I have created a table below with input from many of the managers on…
As with all things, this will take some initial uncomfortable work as we break old habits.
| #Channel | Purpose | Owner | Users |
| 1Daily | Daily – 3 sentence update – done yesterday, plan for the day and any issues | Jon | Core Team – In House Employees & Critical Few Support |
| 2Random Fun | Lots of GIFs | Narcis | In House Employees |
| Project 1 – admin team | Project 1 Manager | ||
| Project 1 – operations team | Project 1 Manager | ||
| Project 2 | |||
| etc |
Slack Tips:
Slack vs Email vs Meeting:
Reference – https://medium.com/office-hours/slack-vs-email-vs-meeting-5b9acf91396c
When to Slack:
When to Email:
When to Meet:
When to do None: (most of these are for me)
Now that you have your backbone of asynchronous communication setup for your remote team it is time to move onto the next step.
Setting up your remote work security policy is important, however, you may not have one, and creating a robust policy from scratch will require too much time and effort before you need it. Below, I’ll go over all the essentials in order to implement solid password management for remote workers.
Here are the basics …
With a remote team, you will need to share login and access information. If you have ever emailed a password, entered into a spreadsheet, or shared one through online chat, you are doing it wrong!
There are a couple of great options out there. We have found 2 that lead to the highest productivity and are effectively priced:
Once you have signed up decide on the vault structure and who will have access to specific logins.
Here is an example table to create before you sign up.
| Vault Name | Purpose of Vault | Who To Provide Access To |
| Project 1 – Finance | Access to payment processing and bank accounts | Owner, Controller/Bookkeeper |
| Project 1 – Admin | Access to logins required to control administrative accounts | Owner, Manager |
| Project 1 – Team | Access to the logins required for each team | Owner, Manager, Team Members |
| Team Member Name | Access to any critical accounts | Owner, Manager, Team Member(s) |
If this structure is followed, then the login for any team member is fully controllable by the Manager and you will never find yourself in a situation where access to a login is unavailable causing the business to grind to a halt.
TIP – Even if you don’t think you need it make a vault for the person so they have someone to put a misc login that isn’t their personal vault (we don’t want anyone using their personal vault).
Like any tool, applying strict guidelines and discipline around it always makes it stronger.
Below is our 12 step password and security check.
We have an internal security auditor who does a monthly check with all team members and remote workers (who have access to passwords) to confirm we are following our internal remote work security policy.
Here is an example of our verification process for the security audit:
There are 2 main systems to use for time tracking. The first is:
UpWork – If we hire someone on Upwork (which as mentioned above we do A LOT), we leverage the platform’s built-in tools.
Clockify – This is a FANTASTIC freemium tool whose functionality for this free model is sufficient. There are paid alternatives like Timedoctor, but after using both I see no reason to not use the free Clockify option (at least in our case). This may vary depending on your needs.
Get started with Clockify
How you manage access to the documents and files people need to work will be very much unique to each company.
Most companies will need to decide between:
Whatever is the lowest pain point of change is likely the best option for your situation.
For us, we are 99% Google Drive/Gsuite, with some documents (typically larger Excel files) shared via DropBox.
If you haven’t made the move to Google Drive and its free options, then now might be a great time to make the change.
Document Signing for Remote Workers
When dealing with remote employees, document signing is something that is obviously more challenging because people are not located in the same area.
We have used a few different solutions, but landed on PandaDoc as being by far our favorite.
The ability to have templates, users and rules make this a very easy solution.
Many other businesses that require proposals to be sent and signed will likely want to look at Proposify or the other one we use, Qwilr.
A LOT of buzz has occurred around video conferencing and certainly, this increase has been warranted and makes sense in today’s technology and remote workforce.
However, there are many solid and (mostly) free options out there.
Like anything, it is best if you can pick one and decide that is your go-to for the team. Jumping from one platform to another can get confusing and messy, not to mention it can make your team look unprofessional to clients.
Which Video Conferencing Solution is Right for your Team?
If it is just your team and you know who you will be speaking with, then Skype is one of the best options. On the other hand, if you need to do conferences with other tech-savvy people then Google Hangouts is a great option. Finally, if you require a little more robust solution with access to specific controls, etc then Zoom is better.
If you don’t yet have a meeting cadence, I highly recommend you decide on one now to provide structure to your remote workers.
All the tools above are useless unless there is a system around how to use them to manage staff.
This typically revolves around a series of meetings each with a specific objective. Our system is based on several great books, including Traction, anything Scrum/Kanban/Agile, and the OkR goal-setting framework.
Based on the books above, here is the basic structure of meetings for our teams (which are currently 100% virtual):
Also referred to as an all-hands meeting, this should be either on a video conference call or the Slack daily channel. The update should quickly cover 3 things for each person.
Make it snappy and take any issues offline to resolve them 1 on 1.
Of all the meetings this is by far the most important!
Any staff/company alignment failure can typically be traced back to a root cause of not having a good enough weekly one-on-one meeting that flagged the issue early enough to be addressed.
The weekly one-on-one meetings follow this agenda:
As with almost everything, this lives in a Google Sheet (you can also use Google Docs, but Sheets is much easier to organize) and a column is inserted each week so that the most recent week is right beside the first column. Tasks can be added to the projects Trello board during weekly meetings.
It’s important that the staff member completes the sheet before the meeting in order for all 1:1’s to be done effectively and quickly. Each meeting should take 15 – 30 minutes.
As my staff like to say only an engineer would create a spreadsheet and consider it an aid for human interaction. But everyone that has bought into the system has either immediately or come to really appreciate the structure and clarity this meeting provides.
Part of the magic of the daily and weekly meetings is they dramatically cut down on all the important, but time-consuming logistical questions that can pop up as a manager. By collecting and responding to issues and tasks during the weekly, you will avoid getting bogged down with menial questions multiple times a day.
This meeting is very metrics-driven, with a review of a kanban to-do list that lives in Trello.
Agenda (varies for each business):
Here is a great guide for a different take on this meeting – https://jake-jorgovan.com/blog/the-lead-cookie-playbook-how-we-run-our-weekly-meetings
This meeting is mostly focused on two things:
The books Traction and Measure What Matters both go over this meeting in great detail.
At the quarterly meeting we do a review of the successes of the previous quarters OkR’s and then set the next quarters.
As managers struggle with team members going remote we will all need to find ways to adapt.
My hope is that by essentially open sourcing how we manage staff remotely companies will be able to be just a little more efficient.
If there are additional guides you think I should be including here please let me know.
Good Reading:
Jon Gillham is a 33 year old husband, father of 3, engineer and a huge fan of developing systems to build useful and profitable websites. The reason I build online businesses is to provide financial independence for my family and yours AND so I can spend time outside skiing and biking with my family. See his entire article at https://authoritywebsiteincome.com/how-to-manage-staff-remotely/.
See http://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bi… Thank you to all patrons who helped make it possible for Louis to travel and speak in front of the legislative bodies throughout the US. To learn more, visit https://repair.org/stand-up.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Watch these two videos. The screen repair business is doomed.
Watch this recent CBS investigative broadcast, and then you decide. (Louis Rossman in this broadcast is awesome. He repairs boards in New York City and is helping to expose the corruption coming from the OEMS. Google for the past year has banned independent repair shops from advertising on their platform, and it has stirred up a movement called “Right-to-Repair”.)
Today’s blog is deviating from our usual tech to bring you the first-ever photographed image of the Event Horizon of a Black Hole. The composite image was made from the combined efforts of several astronomy telescopes from around the world.
Black holes are notoriously hard to find without the use of X-rays and radio telescopes, and taking a normal photograph is almost completely impossible. Each night the 6 different Radio Telescope arrays composited together images of the center of the “nearby” (read 55-million light-years away) galaxy M87.
So how did they do it?
According to Science News
“In order to braid together the observations from each observatory, researchers need to record times for their data with exquisite precision. For that, they use hydrogen maser atomic clocks, which lose about one second every 100 million years.
‘There are a lot of data to timestamp. “In our last experiment, we recorded data at a rate of 64 gigabits per second, which is about 1,000 times [faster than] your home internet connection,” Bower says. The data was then collected onto hard disks and trucked to MIT for analysis.
These data are then transferred to MIT Haystack Observatory and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, for processing in a special kind of supercomputer called a correlator. But each telescope station amasses hundreds of terabytes of information during a single observing campaign — far too much to send over the internet. So the researchers use the next best option: snail mail. So far, there have been no major shipping mishaps, but Bower admits that mailing the disks is always a little nerve-wracking.
Though most of the EHT data reached Haystack and Max Planck within weeks of the 2017 observing campaign, there were no flights from the South Pole until November. ‘We didn’t get the data back from the South Pole until mid-December,’ says Fish, the MIT Haystack astronomer.’”
Personally, I am impressed by this image. For the first time, we are staring at the center of a black hole. Who knows what we will discover by observing an entity in the universe that is 6.5-billion times the mass of our sun.
On Monday this week, Apple released iOS 12.2. If you have the iPhone 5s, iPod Touch 6, and iPad Air or newer, you will want to update to this version immediately because it fixes about 50 major security holes, the majority of which involve the Kernel.
The Full list of fixes can be found on Apple’s Support Page about the update.
A couple of striking ones that should stand out to the average user involve the Safari web browser and WiFi use on their devices. The Safari security fix involved a website’s ability to gain access to sensor devices in a phone without knowledge and consent from the user. The WiFi security hole involved passive location tracking based on your device’s WiFi MAC Address.
Owners of the devices running on iOS should update immediately. To check for Software updates for iOS, go to the Settings app General Software Update. If your device is compatible and has not updated you will be notified about an available update. Make sure your device is plugged into a charger when you update because a power loss during the update will brick the device.
Do NOT open the attachment which looks very legitimate that says there is a complaint against you from Dun & Bradstreet!
Have you every woken up early, anxious and excited to work on something you thought of during the night, just to discover your computer needs an update. The computer lags along slowly while the hard disk is chumming away and sometimes all you can do is wait and suffer through it. I have had this happen to me too many times and decided I needed to find a better solution.
As a manage service provider, Click IT provides our customers with “managed” updates which we do during the night on their servers and workstations. In this way we don’t disturb their work during normal business hours nor do we make their systems behave sluggishly. Why haven’t I been able to manage my own computers in such a manner? Well I have discovered it is because of several reasons which I list below.
During the day I will use up to six different computers. (I know this is not typical.) I have two laptops, use in the office about three desktops and in my home office I also have a desktop I use — so obviously I have a lot of systems I have to update, which is what makes this exercise so important to me.
I have dealt with the interruption that updates caused me in the past, when a system goes into an update, simply by skipping over to another computer. But this hasn’t always been convenient.
Here a list of things to consider:
1) Speed of the computer: Computers, or at least my laptops, are old. I believe I have an eye three and one of them and an old Intel be 950 processor in the other (don’t know what version of Intel this is).
To be continued…
We all like the convenience of online banking, the use of easy credit and getting immediate updates from our Facebook friends or posting on Instagram. But with this new freedom to connect and the advent of Cloud computing, we now live in a much more “transparent” and open society than even just a few years ago; and because our data is no longer centrally nor locally controlled as it once had been, we all have become vulnerable to cyber crime.
So what can you do about your privacy being so much more vulnerable to exposure, where your personal information can be easily compromised? Is there a way you can help prevent cyber crime from happening to you? Yes. Here are some simple steps you can take to help protect yourself against cyber crime:
How we all became vulnerable, from a historical perspective: How did this vulnerability come about? With the level and availability of service offerings exploding, repackaged and offered as applications (“apps”) in the Cloud, your data is now virtually everywhere. Historically, the servers and software running these apps and services, and therefore the storage of your data, has moved from being “hosted locally” (legacy software), to “hosted down the hall” (enterprise software), to now “installed up in the sky” (appliance or “utility” software) in data centers that could be essentially anywhere in the world. Increased Internet speeds, computer storage capacities and improved software have been the main factors enabling this transformation. In using the public network and trusting these apps with your private information, your data has become more vulnerable to cyber attacks and unfortunately experts say it will at one point be compromised, guaranteed, if it hasn’t already. Taking the steps as outlined above will help reduce your risks, but a lot unfortunately will reside on chance and what new vulnerabilities prop up.
Businesses Have More to Consider: If you run an organization or business using computers and are concerned about cyber crime, as you should be, here is some further information you may want to consider as you continue into the new year:
Private versus Public Cloud: Online networks are complicated. Building them well and then maintaining a securely hosted Cloud environment for a myriad of different applications can be daunting. We know because we’ve done it. Privately maintained networks are essentially safer environments to have hosted services with. At ClickIT we maintain a data center in downtown Cleveland, where we host applications, email, websites, data and servers for companies nationwide. It is a much safer environment to be hosted for a myriad of reasons. One reason is because smaller, private networks are less of a target — no pun intended (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pom42RDo_wE&list=PLbLjzX-74Exc1iVoFUJIzyuzGUAC3Wlb0.)
Managed versus Standard Hosting: “Managed” hosting versus “standard” hosting plays an important part when deciding what environment is best for an application or website, especially when data security is important. There’s plenty to consider when needing to secure data of course. Versions of different software running the applications and all the browser updates and constant changes can overwhelm a service provider as we have learned over the years. Not updating server software and then having a new browser appear, as happened recently with the Windows Explorer 10, can cause all sorts of problems. While it takes Systems Administrators and special appliances such as firewalls and servers, the most important element to securing data is the platform (server software) that the data is hosted on. Two broadly categorized platforms to pay special attention to are “Open Source” and “Closed Source”. Linux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux) is an open source platform. When writing software, developers use free software such as PHP which uses MySQL to store information. WordPress sites (on which I’m writing this blog) has been known to be susceptible to hacking attacks, where Viagra ads show up in place of your information, when hosted on external servers. These hackers usually get in through plug ins. Microsoft writes closed source code server software which we use as a Microsoft partner at ClickIT. Many argue that closed source code is less vulnerable to cyber attacks because security holes are subjected and addressed differently. I agree with this based on our own experience here writing software and hosting what we write.
Private Networks are More Secure: The key to securing data on any network so it won’t get lost, damaged or destroyed, is “redundancy”. The most important aspect of any network from getting compromised, is “security”. Private networks are more secure generally speaking because they are less of a target to outside attacks who are looking for bigger fish. “Redundancy” is needed not only in the information but also with the equipment. For instance, every server we own has multiple power supplies and multiple hard drives which are mirrored. Assuring that duplication and redundancy is done properly when you own the equipment, and physically have access to it, in our private Cloud makes the job of securing and protecting the data much easier. While the challenges of securing data remains the same for both private and public networks, the difference is that on a private network you have a better chance of keeping more control over your information, and at least you know where the data is stored and you have immediate and physical access to it.
This rapid acceleration of technology into the fabric of our lives has also perpetuated a tremendous lack of understanding regarding these hosted technologies, and the vulnerabilities it has thrusted upon us.
At ClickIT, we do security assessments where we test the vulnerabilities of a business network. Because most everyone’s particular online presense is unique, the best advise I can give someone concerned about security is to consult with an IT professional or organization like ClickIT, that you can trust, BEFORE you are compromised. Get familiar with all the technologies you’re exposed to daily and learn about what protection mechanisms there are for yourself, your business and your family. This is a new brave world where everyone needs to manage their own line of cyber defenses. At ClickIT we’re here to help and can sit down with you anytime for a consultation at our store at 16 S. Main Street, Chagrin Falls, across form the BP. Come visit us!
