Home office is a major revolution in work culture. After a turbulent period of getting into the rhythm of remote work, it’s time to learn about the tools and strategies that support the productivity of ourselves and our employees.
The turmoil of 2020 has forced most companies to confront home office work. What so far characterized few companies and was rather a lure and an additional benefit for the employee, overnight became a generally applicable norm. However, remote work is not only associated with a change of environment
All areas by which our home office is poorer in relation to the official one, must be replaced with the use of technological tools, and this in turn is associated with the need to acquire new competencies and skills. The administrative and technical challenges are many, so here are some tips for those who do not yet feel confident on this new path
As cliché as it may sound, work is all about people and the space that is created in interactions between them during face-to-face collaboration. Remote work requires us to recreate this space in the most comprehensive way possible, allowing for efficient communication between all employees in the company. In this perfectly fulfill their task clouds. Their advantage is that most companies have already used them to varying degrees, so the transfer will not be such a huge undertaking and will not generate unnecessary delays in work.
Cloud solutions are considered to be the future of business just as the Internet was many years ago. Their greatest potential is definitely in complex solutions. There is a wide range of tools on the market in the form of ready-made packages, thanks to which all major branches are integrated, communication is transparent, and the number of meetings and emails can be reduced to a minimum. In addition, while all or most employees perform their duties at home, working in the cloud provides our business with security, because it serves as the equivalent of a company server.
Efficient communication is key. Here there are many solutions, from the well-known Skype, through Slack and Google Hangouts, to Microsoft Teams. The latter two allow you to create video conferences with a sizable number of participants and viewers, and in addition, for the duration of the pandemic, have removed the fees for full versions of the products.
Document circulation is one of the many pillars of workflow. All electronic versions can easily be hosted in popular cloud spaces like Google or Dropbox Business or on smaller drives like DocuSafe, EDI or WorkFlow. When it comes to documents, it’s hard not to mention the challenges of signing them. For this purpose, the best solution is a digital qualified signature, which has the same legal force as a traditional paper signature. Popular tools in this respect include Asseco Data Systems and Autenti signature by InfoCert.
Not all employees are equally good at prioritizing responsibilities and organizing their time. This is a challenge especially for those people for whom home office is something completely new. In such situations, virtual whiteboards and task management software prove indispensable, among which are Trello, Microsoft Planner and Evernote. The first one is highly praised and universal, mainly due to its simplicity – it functions as a virtual whiteboard on which lists of tasks to do are placed.
As you can see, the number of tools that we can use while working remotely is large, and new products or updates appear on a regular basis. Before choosing a particular path, it is worth doing a thorough research and finding out which of the packages will best suit our needs and the specifics of our business. Despite the need to get used to this – for many still quite wild – space for work, it should be remembered that this step is so important that it is inevitable, and the benefits of intelligent implementation of cloud systems in our company can be really huge.
