10 Apps to Help You Work Remotely

For Home Office Audits to Keep Your Team Healthy — 5S Audit

Created specifically for such industries as manufacturing and hospitality, the 5S Audit app recently came out with a Coronavirus/COVID-19 Home Office Self Assessment Checklist so that employees working from home can keep themselves healthy and stop the spread of the coronavirus.

The checklist includes such questions as:

• Has anyone in your home traveled overseas in the past two weeks?
• Do you know the name and number of a manager or supervisor who you can get in touch with easily?
• Are important files and laptops kept locked away securely when not in use?

Other checklists include Facility Closure, HAZMAT, and Vendor Risk Assessment, among others. More generally, the 5S Audit app helps your team boost efficiency by streamlining audits.

For Banishing Busywork — Zapier

If you find yourself repeating the same mind-numbing trivial tasks in perpetuity, then Zapier is the savior you’ve been dreaming of. This app automates routine tasks — like saving email attachments to your Google Drive or Dropbox — allowing you time to focus on more high-level projects. It even automates your Toggl time entries so you don’t have to manually fill out your timesheets in Google Sheets.

For Quick Communication with Your Team — Slack

The group-messaging app Slack can be used on your smartphone or desktop to communicate with your entire office or privately with your department or even just with an individual colleague. More immediate than communicating via email, Slack lets you send short messages but you can also share files and images through it.

Other platforms such as Dropbox and Google Drive can also be integrated. If you have the paid upgrade, you can also make phone calls and video conferences directly through Slack. This is a great tool for keeping up company culture while everyone's working remotely.

For Virtual Happy Hours and Other Serious Meetings — Google Hangouts Meet

The G Suite is great in general for businesses to use because it means that even if you haven’t established a VPM connection, you can still access your Gmail, calendar, and Google docs from the cloud on the go. Google Hangouts Meet allows you to continue holding your regular meetings face-to-face via video conferencing.  

For Staying in the Public Eye Even When You’re Not in Public — HubSpot

Whether your brick-and-mortar business is open or closed, you have a lot of clients and customers biding their time on social media as they shelter-in-place at the moment. Now is the time to get out in front of them when they can’t come to you. HubSpot allows you to schedule multiple posts across a wide spectrum of social media platforms so you can post to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more all from one central platform. (And the company is offering a number of resources for free or reduced pricing to help marketers communicate with customers during this time.) 

For Stock Photos When You Can’t Hold a Photoshoot — Canva

As a lot more of your business will be done online if your business has not been exempt from shutting its doors during the pandemic, and if your clients and customers are self-quarantining, it’s more important than ever to have strong, eye-catching visuals for your website, social media, and mailings.

Since you likely can’t hold your own photoshoot at this time, turn to Canva’s stock library containing millions of visuals — special features allow you to add your own unique touches like text, filters, and design grids. With Canva, you can also create infographics, logos, and meme generators.

For Figuring out Where All Your Time is Going — RescueTime

You may have thought that now that you’re no longer commuting or distracted by your cubicle mate that you’d get a lot more done — and yet somehow the day seems to just fly by! RescueTime is here to help by tallying up exactly how you’re spending your precious work-from-home hours. You don’t even need to log in the hours because it keeps track of how you divide up your work by running in the background of your desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

For Forcing Yourself to Focus — Serene

If no one hovering behind you when you work from home means you’ve now fallen down the black hole that is the Internet, where all notions of time cease to exist, then Serene is the app for you.

Research has indicated that employees work best when they batch their projects into manageable chunks of time. Serene asks you to input your goals per session at the start of the day so you know how to prioritize your work. After you assign an amount of time for each goal, you can set Serene to block you from apps and social media sites and even silence your phone and set your Slack status. Instead of being a no-nonsense taskmaster, the app enhances your work productivity by giving you breaks and focus music.

For Maintaining Work-Life Balance When Life Itself Feels out of Balance — Daywise

The most successful people are the ones who’ve mastered having a work-life balance. Being a workaholic ironically decreases your productivity. And yet, it can feel so hard to switch off work when you’re working from home. In comes Daywise.

This app lets you pick multiple other apps at a time to schedule for when you don’t want to receive notifications. The notifications you miss will all be stored in Daywise’s inbox so you can review them easily when you get back to work mode.

For Requesting Time off Even When You’re Sheltering-in-Place — Kronos Workforce Mobile

Kronos Workforce Mobile helps you focus on what matters most when you’re working remotely. No matter where you are — even if you’re offline — the app allows managers and staff alike to uphold workforce management responsibilities including clocking in and out and approving timecards, viewing employee benefits information, and requesting and responding to time off to recharge amidst the stress of current events.

Kronos set up a special COVID-19 Resource Center and is troubleshooting specific questions managers have such as how to pay employees the difference between their average and limited working schedules.

Image Credit: Image courtesy of Daywise