The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work. The entire world has moved their desks, and corporate offices to the confines of their homes. With an increasing number of organizations considering hybrid work models for the future, it is essential to plan work activities in a manner that helps employees maintain work-life balance.
While there are definitely long term benefits of working remotely, this alteration has raised concerns for many companies and their employees. From the blurring of professional, and personal boundaries for individuals, to managing teams and tasks remotely, while balancing productivity and time efficiently, working from home comes with its own set of challenges.
To help bring about some balance in your remote working life, you can use applications that help in enhancing productivity and planning. We bring to you a list apps that can be integrated to create a virtual workplace, that makes working from home simpler and more structured.
Apps for team communication:
● Zoom/Join Me/Blue Jeans
Cloud-based video and audio conferencing applications that allow you to connect with your team members face to face, share screens, and take notes as you go. These are great tool that allow you to conduct interactive webinars and team collaboration sessions as well.
● Google Suite/Zoho/Office 365
A powerhouse loaded with cloud-based apps that help you connect, collaborate, and create together. These help your team effectively work together at their own time, changes can be seen in real-time and the option to comment and edit separately helps in simplifying feedback. Keep employees in touch, know their schedules, arrange meetings, and share projects being created.
● Asana/Flock/Jira/Slack
Apps that help in planning, managing, and executing workflows by enabling users to create tasks, set deadlines, assign team members and manage documents to effectively set goals and work collaboratively towards achieving them.
Apps for time management:
● Toggl
Staying in the office brings a sense of decorum that helps in setting professional boundaries, and establishing solid work hours and deadlines. Working from home can be distracting and confusing for many. Losing track of time is one of the greatest issues being faced by individuals, and hence apps like Toggl come in. Toggl helps in keeping a track of time spent, analyzing your habits across platforms, and providing detailed insights that lead to opportunities to increase and improve your workflow by taking control of your time.
● Clockify
A time tracking app that allows teams to keep track of the time invested in tasks and projects, creating timesheets and manually logging their work hours. Clockify is useful to compare and keep track of the amount of time team members have spent working, analyze their effectiveness, and create performance reports using time as a measure.
Apps for administrative activities:
● Snagit
An app that allows you to screen record your tasks and share them across platforms. Snagit is useful in solving doubts, sharing work and co-ordinating on your project. Easily create gifs, videos, photos of your projects, and get consultations from team members for assistance or approval.
● Trello
An app designed to organise tasks, to-do lists, and projects, Trello helps in managing clutter when working on multiple projects. It can also be shared with the team members to work together and stay in sync.
● Dashlane
With new apps surfacing every day, we’re creating new IDs every day. Work from home has led to an increase in the number of apps and accounts being used by an individual and Dashlane is an app designed to securely store these login credentials to ensure that logins are handy when needed.
Apps for enhancing productivity:
● Cold Turkey
With innumerous distractions on the internet, it can be hard to stay focused on the task at hand, and hence cold turkey can help by whitelisting websites to control screen time on social websites that lead to procrastination during work time. Set your work hours and block these distractions during those hours to ensure your focus.
● Deepstash
Social media has got us all in the habit of wanting to excessively scroll through content and browsing apps like Instagram and Facebook have become synonymous with the habit of reading a newspaper for most individuals. Deepstash is a social media platform that helps you select your interests and increase your productivity by replacing memes with insightful blurbs on your topics of interest.
How will these applications help your WFH routine?
While each of these apps possesses its own set of benefits and helps in improving workflow, the true potential behind the benefits of these apps lies behind integrating them.
Having too many apps that you need to keep a check on can cause confusion and hinder coordination for you and your team members. Integrating apps helps to synchronize the functionality of each app and brings the optimal benefits of these in one uniform place making it easy for you and your team to make the most of each application.
You can design a workflow that is unique and customized to the needs of your business, using applications used in your business ecosystem, to stay connected and work collaboratively .
Integrating your apps helps your colleagues to keep up with your work timings and your personal time, organize projects and distribute tasks. Get in touch with us to design a journey that will help you, and your employees to work from home like pros.
