Ask ten people at the same SME how their home setup works and you’ll get ten answers. One’s on a six-year-old personal laptop. One bought a proper monitor out of their own pocket. One’s tethering to their phone because the home broadband is unreliable and nobody’s ever asked. They’re all “working from home”, and the business has no idea what that actually means for any of them.
That gap is where the support calls, the security holes, and the unspoken resentment live. The fix isn’t to micromanage people’s spare rooms. It’s to define a baseline: what the business provides, what it expects, and what “good” looks like, so that home working is supportable rather than improvised. We’ve helped a fair few clients write theirs. Here’s the shape that holds up.
Why a standard at all
Three reasons, and they’re worth being honest about.
The first is support. When everyone’s setup is different, every problem is bespoke, and remote troubleshooting is slow. A known baseline means a known set of things to check.
The second is security. A company-managed, encrypted, patched device is defensible. A personal machine of unknown vintage, shared with a household, is the thing that turns up in an incident report. The standard is how you draw that line without singling anyone out.
The third is fairness, which gets overlooked. If one person expenses a chair and a monitor and another doesn’t think they’re allowed to ask, you’ve created an invisible two-tier workforce. Writing the standard down makes the offer the same for everyone.
The device baseline
This is the non-negotiable part. The machine someone does company work on should be:
Company-provided, or explicitly approved. The cleanest model is a company laptop for anyone doing regular work. Where genuine personal-device use is unavoidable, it’s a deliberate decision with its own controls (a web-only, no-local-data path), not a default nobody chose.
Enrolled and managed. The device is known to the business: encrypted, patched on a schedule, running its security tooling, and capable of being wiped if it’s lost or the person leaves. This is the same enrolment that makes onboarding and offboarding work.
Refreshed on a cycle. A home worker’s laptop is their entire office. Running it until it dies is a false economy, because the productivity cost of a slow, failing machine is paid every single day. We fold home devices into the normal refresh cycle rather than treating them as an afterthought.
The connection and environment
Beyond the laptop, a few things make the difference between someone who can work and someone who’s constantly apologising for their connection.
Broadband that’s actually adequate. Most home connections are fine for one person on calls. The friction shows up in shared houses and rural lines. It’s worth knowing who’s struggling, and a modest contribution to a better line, or a backup 4G/5G option for the people who genuinely can’t get fixed broadband, is cheaper than the lost time.
The call setup. A senior person who’s on video calls all day benefits more from a decent headset and a wired connection to their router than from almost anything else. We’ve watched enough boardroom-quality people sound terrible on important calls to treat audio as a real line item, not a luxury.
A workable screen and seat. Not IT’s department strictly, but it belongs in the standard: a second screen and a chair that won’t wreck someone’s back over a year. The numbers here are small against the cost of the person.
The support side
A home-office standard only works if the support model matches it. That means remote support that can actually reach a managed device wherever it is, a clear “here’s how to get help” route that doesn’t depend on walking to a desk, and a small amount of self-service for the common stuff (password resets, MFA re-enrolment) so a forgotten password at 8am isn’t a lost morning.
It also means setting the expectation both ways. The business provides a defined, supported setup; the person keeps the device patched by not deferring updates forever, doesn’t do company work on the family PC, and flags problems early. Written down, that’s a fair deal. Left unwritten, it’s a series of arguments waiting to happen.
Writing yours
The standard doesn’t need to be long. A page or two covering: what device the business provides and how it’s managed; what it contributes toward connection, screen and seat; how someone gets support; and what’s expected of the person in return. The value isn’t in the document’s length, it’s in there being one at all, applied evenly.
That’s our Managed Services practice. We help define the home-office standard, provision and manage the devices behind it, and run the support model that makes it real.
The companies whose remote setups work didn’t get lucky with disciplined staff. They decided what “set up to work from home” meant, wrote it down, and provided it. Everyone else is running ten different offices they can’t see.
Want to turn “work from home” into something you can actually support? Drop us a note at info@jmopartners.co.uk. One of us will read it.
JMO|Partners · Enterprise IT, sized for SMEs.