With remote employees, hardware troubleshooting gets harder, especially when the company fixer doesn’t have an in-person look at the problem.
For IT departments fixing problems remotely, a tool that helps easily illuminate issues without confusing clients is the holy grail many help-desk teams are still searching for. But more often than not, the one they really need is right in front of their faces: the camera.
“Somebody’s calling in; sometimes they will express the problem, but they don’t know exactly what words to use, or how exactly to describe the problem,” Teddy Bekele, chief technology officer at Land O’Lakes, who encourages the use of video, FaceTime, Teams, and screen-sharing to help bridge any communication gap, told IT Brew.
Good to see ya. Before the pandemic sent employees away from the office and into remote setups, a broken trackpad or screen meant an old-fashioned stroll to the IT desk. Live and in-person, a company techie could pop open the cover, do a few firmware updates, and begin troubleshooting.
When an employee has busted hardware from home, the situation becomes much more complicated for someone like Jason LaPorte, CTO and CISO at Power Consulting, a managed service provider with clients both on-prem and remote. A broken trackpad can become difficult to confirm from afar.
“You have to arrange a day so he can drop it off. Now he’s going to work without his laptop, or you’re going to send him a replacement, and maybe he’s in Michigan…So, now you have to configure that entire machine for his purposes. That’s hours of work potentially,” LaPorte told IT Brew.
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Anybody home? A Pew Research report from February of this year found that 35% of employees with teleworking capabilities are conducting their responsibilities from home all the time. The figure is lower than previous numbers (43% in January 2022 and 55% in October 2020), but significantly higher than before the pandemic (7%).
While Bekele has been setting up the Land O’Lakes conference rooms with video capabilities to support hybrid meetings in the company’s Twin Cities office, the CTO also encourages teams to activate their laptop video during collab calls.
“So, you’re not just seeing like little figurines throughout the room; you can actually see the individual,” said Bekele.
Let me see! Keeping the camera on is important with troubleshooting, too, as Bekele supports a percentage of at-home employees who may have a range of technical difficulties, from bad Wi-Fi to a broken mouse.
Video and screen-sharing helps to establish a helpful “one-on-one relationship,” said the CTO.
The determination of a corrupted Wi-Fi adapter may begin with a FaceTime call and a good literal look at the router, Bekele told IT Brew.
LaPorte and his team use an app that allows a remote employee to share their camera feed via one text link. With the browser-based tool (Rescue from LogMeIn), LaPorte can get a good look at, say, the lights on a router or if the power’s out and the fix is, in fact, an easy one.
“It happens more often than you would think, that somebody’s just not plugged in,” said LaPorte.
Some IT problems are easy ones to see.