Today, working from home has become a necessity for many businesses. In the wake of the global pandemic of Covid-19, more people are working from home than ever. Businesses are forced to adopt flexible remote policies that enable employees to work from the comfort of their own space. But, working from home has its own sets of challenges.
Let’s assume you just woke up & thought to be productive today, but later you found yourself lying on the couch & scrolling Instagram. It’s very easy to get distracted at home. In addition, there are many other challenges, such as communication gap, organizing meetings & keeping everybody in the loop, which may hamper overall performance.
However, getting the most out of your work-from-home practice is possible when you use certain productivity tools & collaborative technology to connect with your employees.
Productivity tools do more than just improving your productivity. It can help you develop good habits, improve quality of work and increase customer satisfaction in the long run. In this article, we have shortlisted some great tools that will help you improve productivity at home without need of going to office.
Top Tools to Improve Productivity at Home
#1 Project Management Tool
Open Project a great project management tool that helps you in keeping your team organized and setting up tasks. Being an efficient collaborative task management tool, Open Project allows your team to create, assign & design tasks swiftly through its visually interactive interface.
You can break up tasks into boards, cards and lists and sort them by individuals or team. As the project progresses, members can slide the cards from one department to another. Throughout the project, Open Project will keep all the members informed about the progress of various tasks.
#2 Communication Tool
Communication is vital for any business, especially when employees are not physically together. Without proper communication tool, the team’s productivity can suffer greatly. Meet is a powerful video conferencing tool that allows you to connect with everybody through video calls along with some notable features like content sharing, screen sharing, whiteboarding & recording.
One person can set up a meeting & send the link to other members who can join the meeting from their desktop or phone. Thus, Meet is one of the most useful communication tools for efficiently exchanging ideas and more.
#3 Cloud Storage Tool
Cloud storage has become quite popular over the last few years because of its convenient file sharing feature. Rather than storing files on your system, just upload them in your cloud folder where you and other team members can access them easily.
Google Drive offers friendly storage limits as well as tons of integration options with Application development tools and CRM tools, making it the best cloud storage platform for work-from-home professionals. It updates and syncs the files in real-time, which means nobody gets to view the old version of the site.
#4 Information Sharing Tool
Synchronizing information across all the channels, departments and members is extremely crucial for any business since even the smallest gap can result in a great dispute later. Zapier allows you to bridge this gap and ensure that all the tools are in sync with each other.
It is very tedious to switch between applications, so Zapier makes sure all the business and customer information is synchronized across all the platforms. It also facilitates the integration of other tools, ensuring the entire team has access to the same information.
#5 Social Media Management Tool
If you are looking for a robust social media management tool, then you can never go wrong with Buffer. With powerful features like content management, automated publishing, schedule post and collaboration, you can manage and handle all your social accounts under one roof using Buffer.
The tool will provide you with analytics data that will give you a keen insight into your social media performance, such as the number of followers, likes, comments and more. With this metric in hand, you can optimize your social campaigns and pinpoint what works the best for your business.
#6 Daily Work Management Tool
If you are looking for a personal assistant that can help you keep track of your tasks, meeting and everything you do, you definitely need a good daily work management tool. With one app, you can see notes, reminders, create schedules, social media events, meetings and personal tasks. You will be able to know what things are coming up, whether it is a meeting with your co-workers or the project deadline is approaching, the daily management tool will remind you of every activity.
This tool helps in keeping your work-from-home system organized by allocating time for every task, timely reminders of the deadlines, keep you in sync with your manager, so can focus better and improve your productivity.
At Velox Softech, we use our in-house built daily management tool called Actionable. It helps us to track work for different projects, meet the deadline and allocate equal weightage to multiple projects. As a company, it adds a great advantage to see the high-level view of each member. To know more about Actionable, please Contact Us.
#7 Distraction Management Tool
No matter how much you complain about going to the office and watch the same boring décor, the physical office has one major benefit – it keeps you productive. Your home is the place where you relax, watch YouTube, scroll Instagram, and not work. That is why it is hard for many of us to stay focused while working remotely.
With Stay Focused application, you can block all the time-wasting sites for a fixed amount of time, so you can concentrate on your work without being distracted. You just need to select the sites you want to block and then set time duration. The tool will block all the selected sites for that specified time, and you will be able to access them only after the time is up.
Wrapping Up
Since Covid-19 has impacted all of us, it has forced companies to shut down their physical premises and work remotely. If you are able to work from home, think yourself lucky because many people have lost their jobs. We hope the above-mentioned tools will help you stay productive and stick to your routine, so you can make the most of your work from home practice.
