Strange times are here.
With officials around the country encouraging employees to work from home when possible to combat the coronavirus, businesses and workers are coming to terms with what effective work-from-home policies look like.
While there’s no one perfect solution, the great news is that there are thousands of apps available that will make things easier for everyone in the coming weeks and months. As we hunker down in our home offices, here’s a list of our 5 favorite apps for working from home:
- Zoom: Love them or hate them, video conferences quickly become necessary when people aren’t allowed to be in the office. Of all of the video conferencing solutions, Zoom is by far our favorite, and it’s available for desktop, iOS, and Android, making it easy-to-use across your entire enterprise.
- Slack: Video conferences are useful for tackling big items, but you’re going to need a way to communicate with coworkers about little things, and to send docs back and forth for review. We use Slack on a daily basis for everything from marketing management to sales discussions. A lot of the beauty of Slack is in its customizability, and instant messaging is invaluable in a remote work setting.
- G Suite (or Office 365): Chances are, your organization is already using one of these two solutions for collaborating on documents and managing email, etc. In that case, ensure that employees have access to the mobile and desktop apps and keep everyone on the same page. If you aren’t currently using G Suite or Office 365, there’s no better time to get started and give your teams a way to collaborate online.
- Trello: Trello is a terrific (and free, at least for low-level versions) project management tool that’s suitable for all sizes of organizations. We like it because it has a dead-simple UI that doesn’t require much explanation. Asana and Basecamp are suitable alternatives if you don’t like Trello’s interface.
- Hours: Finally, depending on your employees’ status, you may need a way for everyone to keep track of time. There are a lot of options out there, the simplest of which is just guesstimating and self-reporting, but Hours provides managers and employees an easy interface for tracking time. In a work-from-home setting where interruptions are likely, this can be an invaluable tool.
Of course, there’s more where these came from! If you have suggestions for apps to add to this list, post them in the comments.
We get it: working from home may not be ideal from the perspective of those of us who usually work in an office. The good news is that we are in a golden age of technology that makes it easier than ever to work from home.
So: pour that coffee, pull up your MacBook, and try your best to enjoy your time working from home!
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