One benefit of the lockdown triggered by the coronavirus epidemic has been a renewed enthusiasm for working at home. Forced to let millions of employees work from home to avoid contagion, companies that had been hesitant about taking this step have concluded they can benefit from moving to a remote workforce.

ITIL has established itself as the gold standard of guidelines for service management over the years. And with so many employees working remotely this year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the best practices and guiding principles of ITIL 4 are arguably more applicable than ever. The sudden shift to remote work for many organizations has forced teams to increasingly rely on technology and find new ways to convey important messages.

Over the summer, we surveyed nearly 400 IT professionals regarding their use of enterprise service management in their organizations. This post highlights some of the survey's key findings, including: For many organizations, this preparation has paid off, with 61% of IT professionals claiming that they are consistently providing the same level of service working remotely, and 47% claiming that their quality of user experience has not suffered because of remote work.

Remote teams are not a new concept. Several organizations have been outsourcing development and support tasks to nearshore and offshore bases for more than a decade. And remote working is gradually increasing given the benefits it gives, like high productivity levels, lower costs, and access to a global talent pool. With the recent COVID-19 outbreak, virtual teams and remote working have truly become mainstream and are being embraced by both employers and employees alike.

The huge shift to remote work this year has presented many new challenges for IT teams—not least of which is the issue of securing the organization when large numbers of employees are now working at home. At PagerDuty, around a fifth of our employees were already based remotely, but the impact of COVID-19 meant that hundreds of other Dutonians had an almost-overnight switch to working away from the office.

At times, directing projects in multiple locales from a desktop or laptop feels like conducting an orchestra in the dark. Coordinating with diverse, remote teams of developers producing software on an agile schedule of continual updates and releases can be especially nerve-wracking. At Sleuth, we’re crushing the remote-work challenge because, in 20 years of managing from afar, we’ve learned a thing or two — actually three — about how to do it right.

A key topic of conversation that comes up again and again with our customers is the challenge of collaboration in a remote work environment. Too many channels of communication or documentation are ineffective, and IT professionals are starting to feel fatigued by never feeling quite “in the know” with business decisions that are happening in real-time. When separated from colleagues, teams can feel distant and unmotivated or find it hard to stay focused.

As a researcher interested in teamwork and team effectiveness, March 2020 was a fascinating moment for me. Around the world, knowledge workers at organisations large and small were suddenly forced to work from their homes. As we scrambled to get a read on the effect this was having inside Atlassian, we also commissioned an international, multimodal study to capture and make sense of the impact on individuals and teams across a range of industries as they grappled with these extraordinary changes.

For today’s tech tip, we’re going to focus on our Endpoint Monitoring Client and two specific use cases: Wi-Fi and application health. With so much of the workforce working remotely, Endpoint Monitoring is an essential tool to help smooth the transition. According to recent research from Gartner, nearly half of US employees will continue to work remotely for at least some of the time post-pandemic.