5 Tools to Help Your Employees Work from Home
While the internet makes working from home significantly easier and more convenient, efficient coordination can be challenging when teams work remotely. Sure, sending out emails to prospects and communicating with your employees via chat or video conference is easy, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are several other significant tasks that you and your team need to carry out efficiently from day-to-day.
While the internet makes working from home significantly easier and more convenient, efficient coordination can be challenging when teams work remotely. Sure, sending out emails to prospects and communicating with your employees via chat or video conference is easy, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are several other significant tasks that you and your team need to carry out efficiently from day-to-day.
Proper communication, coordination and collaboration, and efficiently performing individual responsibilities are vital, too. Tasks like preparing reports for meetings, analyzing potential markets, collaborating with team leaders, and even creating an Excel marketing plan template become simpler with the help of the right work from home tools.
Here are five tools that can help you and your employees efficiently work from home.
1. Microsoft Office Teams – General Collaboration
If you use Microsoft tools for your tasks, Teams is your best possible option. It allows you to download Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Use this suite of tools to collaborate with your team anywhere, anytime. It is available via desktop, laptop, and smartphones.
Regularly communicate with each other through the chat feature. Choose to chat with someone one-on-one or with everyone in the group altogether. There are emojis, stickers, and GIFs if you want to add some fun to your conversations.
Collaborate through email or by video call. Microsoft Teams has a Teams calling feature, a Phone System, Direct Routing option, and Calling Plan.
Create folders for your team. Send, edit, manage, and store documents. Use the downloaded Office apps when working on your files (for example create and edit Excel spreadsheets online and in real-time).
Microsoft Teams allows as many team members (even 10,000) as possible in a video conference or group chat.
2. Google Suite/G Suite – General Collaboration
Google Suites gives you and your team access to Google tools such as Drive, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, and Google Meet.
Use Drive to create team folders, share, edit, and store files. Use Google Docs for regular documents and Sheets for spreadsheets. Slides allow you and your team to share real-time visual presentations.
Google Calendar is where you and your team coordinate and monitor schedules such as meetings, appointments, and deadlines.
Video conferencing on G Suite is done through Google Meet, which integrates with all your Google apps. So, while you’re in conference with your team, you can access and share documents, spreadsheets, slides, and your schedule via Calendar in real-time.
Meet allows up to 100 participants in one conference.
Google Suite is available on desktop, laptop, and on your mobile phones.
3. Monday.com – Task Management
Monday.com is a platform that helps you track your team’s work progress. It’s simple to use through its intuitive UI. Communication, projects, and workflows are centralized, so it’s a convenient way to monitor team movement.
You and your team have access to ready-to-use templates that are easy to customize according to your team or business needs. There’s a template for daily team tasks, for individual tasks, time tracking, employee onboarding, and for one-on-one meetings, among many others.
Monday integrates with several business tools. It also has affordable pricing packages.
4. Intercom – Message and Client Communication
If you want to stay in touch with your clients, use Intercom. This messaging app allows you to communicate with clients conveniently. The goal is to guide them so that transitioning from being a website visitor to becoming a paying client is convenient.
Intercom also makes it easy for your team members to track and analyze client interaction and engagement.
5. Canva – Design and Creative Visual Collaboration
Canva is used for designing and creating visual materials. Teams use it primarily for branding and social media campaigns. It’s the simpler version of Adobe, but it comes with a lot of features.
Design templates and share these with your team members. At the same time, they can share their concepts and designs with you, too. All you have to do is create an account for your team.
Canva also has numerous categorized and well-made templates. There are templates for use on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Zoom virtual backgrounds, logos, posters, invitations, and birthday cards.
You can access Canva on your desktop, laptop, and smartphone.
These are just five of the many tools you can use to help your employees conveniently work from home. Before choosing which one (or ones) to use, keep in mind that you need something that will help you and your team seamlessly collaborate and stay productive and continuously updated with all plans and projects.
- Follow Anthony Stevens on:
