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With the amount of COVID-19 cases on the rise in the current month, officials across the globe have opted for social distancing by shutting public locations, including malls, film theaters, gyms and swimming pools. Several private companies followed suit by encouraging workers to operate from home. With the technology at their disposal, Work from Home is no longer an inconvenience.
Here’s a compilation of 20 apps that will make working from home much simpler:
Virtual meetings:
There are a number of all-in-one apps designed to support remote employees conduct and record virtual meetings.
Zoom is a popular tool for coordinating collaborative meetings with a large team. It also allows users to record and broadcast meetings for later.
Team Viewer is a remote communication software that enables the sharing of desktops, online meetings, web conferencing and file transfer between computers.
Join.me is another option with features such as screen sharing apart from audio and video calling.
Zoho provide its remote communication service free of charge until 1 July 2020 with functionality such as video and audio calls, real-time collaboration, messaging, etc
Mainstream tech companies also pitching in with their web conferencing and online collaboration tools. For eg, Cisco provides 90-day free licenses to non-customers for its Cisco Webex online collaboration tool. Tech giants like Google and Microsoft are now providing popular company services like Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts business. Earlier this month, Google revealed that it will also be giving out the advanced features of its Hangouts for Business free of charge until July. For many other popular video conferencing devices, there’s still a plain old Skype for companies.
Daily communication:
In the case of work from home, regular contact is important. Users can use free chat services such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger for group communication with colleagues over text.
Few businesses have also moved to Telegram for smoother communication between colleagues over text. Telegram also lets users transfer files and documentation as well as communicate via text messages over the app
My chosen option is Microsoft’s Slack. Slack also lets users transfer files and documents over the app. Nevertheless, the free edition of Slack has a cap on the number of messages that can be sent and archived between a team. Organizations may decide for the paid option which is meant for bigger teams, depending on the number of employees to be used for.
For Apple consumers, FaceTime is often a popular choice for one-on-one communication with team members.
Work management:
Trello is a helpful tool to keep track of current tasks and the progress performed by team leaders. It’s a virtual roster for carrying out to-do lists of team leaders for various boards with specific tasks where all participants can track the work completed, give comments and share links of work completed. Trello is available for iOS, Android, and Windows.
Asana, a SaaS tool developed by Facebook’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, is a handy tool for project management. There is a free edition of the app that is accessible with restricted options, enabling 15 team leaders to collaborate together on a project through task lists and boards for projects. The Paid models versions add more features such as timeline, schedules, advanced reporting, etc. The ios version of Asana is available on iOS and Android only, unlike Trello.
Basecamp is a perfect option for smart project management. This operates with small scale projects and is available with iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. The app includes a messaging page, a chat room, and even allows file transfer. A limited version of the app is available for free. Users with larger teams to Work more closely can opt for the paid version.
Document management:
Quip is a powerful application that helps users to create calendars, spreadsheets, word documents and share the same with colleagues.
Google Drive is a convenient choice, particularly for current users of Gmail. Nevertheless, the storage capacity on Drive is limited. Users can buy extra storage for their Drive using the paid version.
Dropbox is indeed a popular place to store and transfer files of large volumes. Users can save their files and share them with other users if they need to be allowed to edit, update or add new stuff.
Box is an alternative to Google Drive and Dropbox that enables people to save and share files securely. The app can also be integrated with Office 365, Google Apps and Slack.
Apart from the 20 apps that can help remote workers manage meetings and projects, there are a number of apps that can help employees stay productive.
