Article Apr 1, 2020 3 min read

How Pexip created a telework policy to support its culture of remote work

Geir Aasen

Apr 1, 2020 3 min read

Geir Aasen

As a video conferencing company, remote work is in our DNA. In fact, roughly half of our employees work from home offices around the world, where they can easily meet with customers, partners, and colleagues using our own video platform. For many years, remote work at Pexip was easily managed with informal best practices, but as the company has grown, we’ve formalized a telework policy to ensure that everyone has clear guidance on how to operate at home, and to minimize risks to our own organization and those we work with.

Why establish a telework policy?

The digital world today is borderless. With cloud-based services, our data is sent halfway around the world before we even realize it. While this is a brilliant solution for remote workers that makes it easy to work from anywhere, it also gives those workers access to enormous amounts of data and could expose their organization to major data privacy and security risks. To protect this information, it’s important to consider three key elements commonly known as the CIA triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

- Confidentiality: Ensures that only authorized parties have access to certain information.
- Integrity: Ensures that data is not altered in any way.
- Availability: Ensures that the data can be accessed, when needed.

Working remotely and easily having access to confidential information can be a risk for the company, therefore having technological and organizational measures in place enables the company to lower the risk, while giving the remote worker the necessary tools to perform the job.

The process of creating Pexip’s teleworking policy

Data security is paramount when remote workers are using cloud-based tools, and we knew we needed to protect data shared with Pexip, data we store, the data transfer process, and how the data is safeguarded and protected to maintain integrity and privacy.

By putting robust technological and organizational measures in place, together with a company culture of accountability, we could effectively work from anywhere without putting our customer data at risk.

At Pexip, we formalized internal best practices in a “Mobile Device and Teleworking Policy.” This was part of a company-wide effort to comply with ISO/IEC 27001:2013, the international standard for information security, which we achieved earlier this year.

Employees can reference this policy to understand the acceptable use of Pexip information and devices, guidance on password protection, accessing the corporate network, and using anti-malware software.

How Pexip lives it out every day

Working remotely and using our Pexip meeting platform in conjunction with other productivity cloud services has been one of the core success elements enabling Pexip to grow globally. The way we work, act and live is tightly related to our strong company culture, which can be described as “The Pexip Way” (One Team, No Bullshit, Professional & Fun, Freedom & Responsibility). By documenting best practices, we can more easily onboard new employees and ensure that everyone is on the same page when working from home.

For more tips on enabling a remote workforce, check out this Definitive Guide to Working from Home.