For the last 25 years, Tech Networks of Boston has been a small but mighty team helping solve technology needs in the Greater Boston area. Over the past two decades, we have seen a lot of change. TNB began as a home computer installation company of one and moved into managed services in the early 2000s, employing over 30 people from our headquarters in South Boston. We have continued to serve our clients through a variety of changes in the social, political, and economic landscapes in our city and country. We pride ourselves on our resilience, but that was put to the test when our client and internal operations went fully remote almost overnight.
For several weeks, management at Tech Networks of Boston watched the news about the novel coronavirus, sharing information with our team about what preventative measures they could take to keep themselves and others safe. Since most of our staff works at client sites full time, we made sure that on-site technicians were also aware of client policies and protocols. In our headquarters, we implemented new procedures and increased the sanitization of high-touch surfaces in our office.
When clients began instituting remote work policies, we instructed our on-site staff to work remotely as well. On March 16, we announced that our entire company would work remotely for the duration of the stay at home advisory in Massachusetts, and possibly beyond. We have worked hard to keep our team and our clients informed on our current status and armed with resources that can help them in their personal and work lives.
As of today, we have been a fully remote company for more than two months. During this time, our service desk has received thousands of service tickets, we’ve helped resolve hundreds of remote access and VPN issues, and we have successfully completed all our scheduled site visits remotely. We are still helping our clients solve their day-to-day issues and continuing planning for future IT infrastructure changes and upgrades. While this transition has been difficult on our team and our client organizations, we are 100 percent operational. We relied on help and information from our clients to make this possible, including updated emergency contact information, organizational guidelines on home-printing, and asking end-users to supply personal contact information with service requests since many are without access to their work phone systems. We’ve helped set up new VPN and remote access systems for some organizations while troubleshooting user-specific issues at others, ordered and remotely set up workstations for people to use at home, and put together technology guides to help understand security best practices.
Our team is working harder than ever and under a particularly challenging set of circumstances. We have provided resources to help our internal team manage their physical and mental health, but we are also finding new ways to stay connected. We’ve set up a weekly virtual happy hour on Friday evenings so we can play games online and wind down from the work week, some team members have shared friend codes for their Nintendo Switch games, and we’re currently putting together a collaborative playlist so we can share our favorite work from home tunes.
Despite the value of being physically apart right now, the need for community has never been greater. We are proud to serve our nonprofit and mission-driven clients, we are proud to have such a kind and compassionate team of techies, and we are grateful for the ability to work remotely. If your organization is having any COVID-19 related challenges (or triumphs) you’d like to share with us, please reach out.
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