With the advent of COVID, much of the world was plunged into a strange new world of remote work. The speed and extent of the switch was remarkable. Although the past two years have seen some bosses enforce “return-to-office” mandates, in many organizations, sectors and roles, the "New Normal” is remote or hybrid work. In the U.S. today, over a third (35%) of employees who can do so work from home all the time.

While this setup may be good for productivity, job satisfaction, and access to talent, it presents  distinct challenges for the IT administrators and managers tasked with making remote work a reality. In the startup world, where employees are more likely to be offered such perks, the challenges are particularly acute.

So how can IT admins adapt? AccessOwl spoke to several practitioners to find out more. Here are their observations:

1. Move With The Times

IT is instrumental in supporting remote working, says Grant Bordelon, IT Operations Specialist at Rep Data.

“So many things that people assumed had to be done in the office, we found out really quickly that they didn't have to be. And that is becoming more the norm now,” he says. “I just have to support where the trend is going. I have to move with the times.”

In doing so, IT specialists like Bordelon can ensure their organization can access the largest pool of talent possible.

“Employees say ‘if I'm answering phone calls and sending emails you better let me work from home. Because if you don’t, someone else will and I’ll go work for them’,” he says. “IT is the one who’s facilitating that.”

2. Take Advantage of Cloud-Based Tech

Moving with the times doesn’t just mean supporting workplace trends in general. It means understanding what tools are available on the market to empower remote working, Bordelon continues. He cites Monday for project management and Rippling for workforce management as two SaaS tools that have made his current role a lot easier.

“Technology is moving so fast in our organization. We don't have a [real] physical premises,” says Bordelon. “We’re using Rippling to handle our inventory. So we ship devices out to a warehouse. We ship from a warehouse. And almost everything is hands off, but still being managed by myself. It’s so much different to how it was years ago, when I was walking around with a USB drive to re-image computers.”

Cloud technology has advanced to the point where IT administrators can also do their jobs fully remotely if required, he adds.

“With the prevalence of Azure, AWS and these hosted systems now, not only is the physical office gone, but the server room has too—the infrastructure that was in your network,” says Bordelon. “The whole mindset has really changed.”

3. Understand Your Users’ Requirements

To offer the best possible user experience to employees, IT administrators must carefully consider which tools they find most intuitive. That’s why Rep Data offers a Slack channel for IT support.

“Chat services are huge. Companies are being taken over by Millennials and Gen Z, and what are we used to? We're used to chatting and quick responses,” says Bordelon. “If you want to at least emulate what the real work environment is like in an office, you need to have these chat functions. From an IT perspective, it's realizing that people need these. It's supporting them, and getting them the tools they can use to work together.”

4. Hone Your Logistics Skills

The modern, globally distributed remote-working startup has also forced IT admins to get better at supply chain logistics, according to Felix Naepels , Head of Internal IT at Pigment.

“We didn't use to be logisticians before maybe COVID. But now this is a huge part of our job. How do I make sure that ‘so and so’ in California we'll get a laptop next Monday and at the same time this guy in Germany and that guy in London? Suddenly I’m a UPS expert,” he says.

“Our job has really changed over the course of maybe five or 10 years.”

5. Don’t Forget Security

When users and IT assets are decentralized, sometimes across multiple jurisdictions and time zones, there’s an urgent need for IT to manage the additional cyber risks this can create. Employee-owned devices and home networks may be less secure, while cloud data and assets could be exposed to anyone capable of guessing or phishing the right password, for example.

That’s why Erik Ours, IT Manager at Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo, focused primarily on creating a zero trust environment, soon after joining a previous company.

“Zero trust is not one thing. It's a model of how you can take different elements and make them work more cohesively together in a very spread out, remote type of IT managed environment,” he explains. “One of the first things I did was to consolidate down to what would be our core systems, and then bring them into some type of SSO managed solution.”

6. Be Culturally Sensitive

Ours was also keenly aware in that role, and his current job, of the need to take into account cultural differences when managing IT across globally dispersed teams. This is important not just to create a better end-user working environment, but also to minimize the risk of shadow IT, he claims.

“One of the challenges I have is to identify the right framework to apply so that I can align the services to better support the team. And very specifically, to regionalize it within Japanese culture and Korean culture so that people feel very comfortable coming to IT for their requests,” Ours says. “If you build trust with people, they will not hide things from you.”

Working in an organization with 10 offices around the globe has also forced him to think more carefully about how he interacts with his peers at the company, he adds.

Lukasz Jaroszuk, Certified IT Manager at Kaia Health, also recognizes the importance of cultural sensitivity when managing remote workers. This is less relevant in the US, but extremely important in Europe, he argues.

“It's a bit annoying coming from a different ‘world,’ but I acknowledge that this is the way a certain culture is developed and I can either try to fight it or I can adapt,” Jaroszuk says. “They are behaving that way and there's a reason for it. I have to understand why, and let them understand my point of view and find that middle ground. As a Polish national, I did it in Ireland for 18 years, and now I'm doing it in Germany.”

These differences can manifest not only in employee behavior, but also more prosaic matters, like keyboard layout.

“A manager sitting in Boston in the US told me onboarding is easy. And I said ‘yes it is in the US. But we have a call center in Italy, France and Germany, and they have different keyboard layouts,’” Jaroszuk says. “There’s even a slight difference between UK English and international English keyboards.”

Blending technical and cultural awareness

Remote working provides the work-life balance that today’s ambitious workers demand, while allowing employers to access a much larger talent pool. But it can also introduce cultural, logistical and security challenges.

Today’s IT managers and admins must combine technical nous with cultural sensitivity to navigate these challenges—and provide the support that the modern distributed startup demands.