Whether you’re looking to get with the times or to adapt to the latest crises, there’s no denying that business owners, freelancers, and workers have all been looking a lot more closely at the prospect of working remotely. A lot of us are setting up home offices, but we also need to make sure we have the tech infrastructure that can keep us connected, keep us organised, and keep us productive. To that end, here are a few examples of software that might save your skin while you’re working remotely.
Catching up with the team
Communication will remain key, no matter whether you’re in the same room as your team or halfway across the world from one another. Solutions like email are not going to work because they don’t suit synchronised communication, as you never know when someone is going to open an email. IMs are more instant, as the name suggests, but harder to track and analyse. Team communication and collaboration tools are different, as they allow you to directly talk to your colleagues much like an IM, but they also allow you to split conversations into different subjects, groups, and work projects. It’s a new kind of online communication devised specifically for teams working together, so it’s built to be both convenient and highly organised. It’s also worth thinking about security as well. In this day and age making sure devices are encrypted is of high importance and if you’ve not considered it yet, a sky encrypted phone could be something that you might want to think about investing in.
The face to face meeting
Sometimes, typing your thoughts down and sending them is not the most efficient way to have a conversation. Instead, it might be much better to have that face-to-face conversation. However, that might not be possible due to current circumstances or simply because you’re rarely in the same location. To that end, take a look at some of the best online conferencing tools for work teams. You don’t necessarily have to have a webcam or smartphone camera to make use of these tools, and they can help everyone get in on the conversation regardless of the device they’re using. Be it desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone or something else, so long as it can install the app, you can have those productive meetings without too many obstacles in your way.
Keeping notes
Throughout the workday, whether it’s via email, something you just thought up, or during a face-to-face meeting, you’re going to want to take some notes at some point. If you have a pen and paper pad, that can work just fine, but there are great note-taking solutions that can not only keep your notes organized but sync between different devices so, if you want to share your notes with a colleague, it’s made much, much easier.
Setting out the day ahead
You or members of your team may have to deal with the fact that you have to self-direct your work much more autonomously than you have in the past. Working remotely means working under your own steam a lot of the time, which also means you have to dictate which work you’re going to do when, and what work is going to get prioritised over others. To-do lists can help you keep track of which tasks you have to do, but which should you do first? Some of the best prioritisation matrix software of 2020 can help you figure that out by ordering your tasks with urgency and importance being the two ranking factors. You can then see which work you should do now, what should be done later today, and what can perhaps be held off to tomorrow if need be.
Keeping time
No matter what kind of business you’re running, it’s very likely that managing your time well is going to be an important part of keeping the business running smoothly. Of course, you can everyone keep their own time separately, but that makes it much easier for miscommunication to get in the way and for people to end up missing meetings, deadlines, or simply being out of communication when they’re needed. The best free employee scheduling software tools in 2020 allow you to set a schedule that is seen and influenced by all workers who have access to it. You set the schedule, everyone can see it. They can also input their own schedules so that you can see what they’re supposed to be doing at any given moment of the day. As such, if you see that they’re busy, you will bear in mind not to bother them, for instance.
Tracking your time
There may be parts of the employee’s day that are rigidly scheduled, but much of the day-to-day work might be done on a somewhat looser timeline. As such, for work where there are no hard deadlines, you want to make sure that everyone is using their time as productively as possible and, where there are problems with time management, you want to be able to find solutions. Time-tracking software for remote employees lets you and your team see where and how they’re spending their time, allowing you to pinpoint distractions and inefficiencies that you can then work together to solve. Time-tracking software like using Teams timesheet for remote employees lets you and your team see where and how they’re spending their time, allowing you to pinpoint distractions and inefficiencies that you can then work together to solve.
Sharing resources
If you’re all working together online, then you’re not going to be able to simply print out what you need and pass it on to your colleagues. You have to rely on online transfers, which you may already do to some extent. However, when it comes to a wider team that is working only online, then even emails can be a relatively inefficient way of sharing files and resources. Instead, look at some of the best online Cloud storage options that allow everyone to access the same pool of resources so long as they have the right login details for the account. If you’re dealing in sensitive data, public options like Google Drive might not be enough, you may have to invest in private Cloud servers.
Planning together
If your team all has their own work to do, then giving them tools to schedule their own day can work just fine. However, when it comes to collaborative projects, there may be times when one person is waiting for the progress of another person before they can do their own work. Bottlenecks can be common and deadly to any sense of productivity or efficiency. This is why online work-flow and project management tools are so vital for modern collaborative projects. You can get a bird’s eye view of what everyone has to do and how it influences other work, including who they have to report to, helping you sort out bottlenecks before they have the chance to happen.
Taking a direct look
Sometimes, you’re communicating with a member of the team, and you have a hard time coming to a point of mutual understanding regarding a certain process or problem. Sometimes, they might waste a lot of time trying to describe an issue when they could simply show it to you instead. You might not be able to look over their shoulder, but with some of the best screen-sharing software of 2020, you can remotely look at their screen or even take control. This can allow you to see the issue in real-time and even to solve it yourself. These tools are even more important for any members of the team who are supposed to be providing IT or software support.
Meeting your customers
Many of the tools above have been all about getting the team organized and connected, but we can’t leave customers and clients out of the equation. Online instant messaging, social media, and web conferencing tools might be enough to touch base with established clients. But what about new customers looking for support or guidance? Your online presence is hugely important to your business, so keeping the lines of communication open and easy is important. Nowadays, live in-website chat apps can allow you to directly talk to any customers who visit your website. You can even use AI chatbots to help answer the most frequently asked questions and guide them to resources that might save your team a lot of time, but still patch you through if they need direct human communication.
Getting feedback
You need to touch base with your team and get their feelings on how workflow, communication and other aspects of work-life are going. Needless to say, these can be difficult questions to ask and answer directly, so using a feedback gathering tool to do that for you can lend them some space and anonymity, allowing for more honest and detailed answers. Some of the best online quick feedback tools allow your employees to continuously update their sense of happiness and productivity, allowing you to better monitor the trends that govern how they’re feeling about their work, which also governs the kind of results you can expect to see from them.
Although many are still reluctant to throw their whole energy into remote working, with the help of the tools above, you may find that it can actually be more productive and more efficient than having to share the same office space. Maybe this temporary change could end up revolutionising the workplace much more widely.
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