Top 10 productivity tools for working from home

Workplaces everywhere are implementing and expanding programs to help their employees work remotely. It’s likely that remote work will become a new normal as countries try to flatten the curve of exposure. Here are the top 10 productivity tools for working from home to make the change easier for management and for employees.

While working from home we will require some tools like primary, communication & accountability, all of them are essential while working remotely.

1.Primary tools for work from home: Primary tools are similar to basic tools while completing a task or work while working from home. Now a day’s technologies make it possible for an employee to effectively work in a remote environment while using the primary tools.

• Laptop/Desktop: As an employee, one need to have a desktop or laptop while working from home. If not, work with your concerned IT team to discover the possible way to find the alternative. It may probably require to connect the work desktop through a fixed connection on employees' personal laptop or short-term deployment of office machinery for the work from the home period.

• Mouse/Keyboard: While it’s feasible to acknowledge to emails, generate in-depth reports, and handle data with a laptop in place, but it’s delightful to have a keyboard and mouse when an employee working from home for an expanding phase of time. Establishing employees who have access to these apparently basic accessories can help comfort and typing speed, which increases productivity.

• Network connections: When an employee is working from home smooth connectivity of the network is essential and by ensuring this one can ensure proper workflow of any task. Whether you are using Wi-Fi or personal data connection kindly make sure it is safe and secured. It is also better to use official VPN while connecting it remotely from a web browser and use the same browser for official work.

2.Communication tools for work from home: When an employee is working from home, he/she is in a complete isolation environment. So, while communicating with the internal team as well as with external customer we require communication tools for a clear understanding of your work scheduling, monitoring, daily work planning, and communicating effectively across.

• Chat Software: When an employee is working remotely applications such as Slack or Google Hangouts help employees not only connect but communicate with each other. These tools allow employees to work together as a team and keep up the bonding across.

• Consultation software: Software like Google Meet or Zoom or Skype lets an employee meet together while consulting remotely. If employees are not familiar with the protocol of virtual meetings, take some time to learn it, like when to mute the microphone and how to structure an appropriate action for client calls.

• Planning software: While planning your work in a remote work environment Microsoft Outlook calendar, Google calendar are essential tools, where an employee can schedule, monitor, set remainder and add the task as per requirement, it helps an employee to plan the work accordingly and stay active as per schedule.

• Project management software: Some of the most prime communication happens as cross-functional teams review a project road map jointly in project management software. Project management tools like Wrike, Jira, Trello, or Asana help accomplish a compact location for notifications, collateral, and all project requirements.

• Productivity software: While working from home employee productivity is one of the factors that every employer considers while giving them options for remote work. Google Drive or Microsoft Office suite are those essential tools required during work from home to check the productivity. In both software one can create, modify, manage, share, upload documents in real-time.

3.Accountability tools for work from home: While organization care for your employee's experience, you, as an employee also have a duty towards your employers to ensure that you stay as productive as they can be. These remote tools can help everyone stay accountable in spite of the distance between you.

• Cloud-based time tracking: Having well-integrated and intuitive time-tracking software(https://carbonateapp.com/) is one of the most essential tools for remote work. Keeping employees accountable for their check-in & out time and is as simple as while operating from a mobile device.

• Cloud-based analytics: While managers and employees can discuss the productive side of remote work, the validation is in the numbers. Using (carbonateapp.com) software to create reports can help track your performance, productivity, and other important metrics.