Necessary tools to help you work at home in current times.
As coronavirus pandemic spreads across the globe at a rapid rate, it threatens the market of various multi-national companies crippling them to function normally. In these situations, the business across the globe is quickly adopting a more flexible approach — Work From Home.
With the number of COVID-19 cases on the rise all over the world, authorities across the countries have advised all the private-sector companies to follow preventive measures to keep the vast majority of the population safe. They have been advised to promote “social distancing” more and it should be their top priority. Companies have taken the advice seriously and have adopted several methods to prevent any contamination among their employees. Most of the companies are now shifting to a more flexible culture of working from home. Although work from home is not a new concept, it has never been done to such a large extent before.
If you are a corporate employee then there’s a good chance you are sitting at your home with things to do as a remote team member since the offices are closed until further notice. But a good employee working from home is as much productive as good his tools are. First and foremost you definitely need a laptop and a high-speed internet connection. Here I present to you a few tools which are my top picks for such scenarios.
Slack
My personal favorite for team communications and handling remote teams. Slack is among the most popular work collaboration tools around today. Instead of a single overstuffed inbox, conversations in Slack happen in dedicated spaces called channels. Working in channels gives everyone in your team a shared view of progress and purpose. Slack makes it simple to follow conversations or find important information in an easily searchable archive. It is also easy to prioritize conversations in slack. It gives your remote team members a hub where they can gather for both professional and team-building purposes. Slack lets you have individual chats with co-workers, create groups for particular sections or topics within your team and also maintain message history. With Zuzu AI extension Slack can really prove to be the best tool to work from home.
Hangouts
Google Hangouts is most probably the tool that many people ignored earlier. It has seen something of a comeback in recent months. While originally it was developed as an instant messaging application, it can now be used not just for messaging but also for group video calls. Users can effectively switch between participants, quickly turn off and on audio and video for ease of communication, and have largely seamless conversations remotely.
Hangouts Chat makes it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate easily and efficiently. With dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat makes it simple to track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members. Hangouts Chat is offered to G Suite customers at no additional cost. Upload items from Drive, collaborate on Docs, Sheets, or Slides, join online meetings with Hangouts Meet, or use Google’s powerful search to look up room members, past conversations, and shared files. Drive bot lets you know when files are shared with you, comments are made, or when people request access to your docs. And Meet bot integrates directly with Calendar to schedule meetings for you.
Zoom
Zoom is the swiss army knife of video conferencing. Zoom is Ranked #1 in Customer Reviews. Combining HD video with increasingly important features like screen sharing, content sharing, and local recording make it an obvious choice for organizations in need of an end-to-end conferencing solution.
For starters, Zoom makes meetings more accessible. Only one person needs to download it — everyone else can click the meeting link to jump in from their phone, desktop, or tablet.
Zoom can also enhance collaboration during meetings. Whether toggling between participants to share screens or making use of shared touch screens with whiteboarding, Zoom offers more ways for participants to exchange ideas than most video platforms on the market.
Github
GitHub is a development platform inspired by the way you work. From open source to business, you can host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 40 million developers. Take collaboration to the next level with security and administrative features built for teams. GitHub brings teams together to work through problems, move ideas forward, and learn from each other along the way. The conversations and code reviews that happen in pull requests help your team share the weight of your work and improve the software you build. You can ask for feedback, comment on each other’s code, and work on projects collaboratively. Plus, with Github’s Slack integration, code reviews and pair programming are even easier.
