Corona triggers "work from home" initiative - Part 2

Today most people in the world know about the risks connected to meeting other people, the risk of using public transport and to attend concerts and other gatherings.

We still want to live our lives and we try to live at ease without having to worry about the Coronavirus news updates.

We see that not only countries take measurements to fight the spread but also that companies start to restrict employees' movement and encourage them to not travel nor have meetings in person but to use remote meeting tools.

So what I started to explain in the first part of this series of articles happened overnight and its time to move on and increase awareness of what tools to use, when and why.

In this article, I will cover the basics and the tools that are most widely used but not step into detail with every tool but I assure you that there are many tools that you have not tried or even heard of before which can be used to make the new way of working from home more smooth and even more efficient.

In the previous article, we talked about different topics of tasks that you do throughout your workday so that you could separate them and find out what tools you might need to perform each task outside of the office but also realize what tasks you can't do outside the office and why.

So let's start by looking at that list of examples again. Note that obviously there will be many more topics that I did not cover in this example so feel free to write in the comments what other topics you like me to cover and what type of tools you feel you need apart from the ones we list in today's article.

E-Mail

In most situations, there will be access to email outside of the office but you might have to follow security requirements set up by your company so make sure you know how to login to your webmail or how to login to your email using an email client, there are both local clients and cloud clients that you can use to work with your email.

Reporting

Depending on how your organization work with reporting this could either be done in the same way as you have done in the past or you might have to discuss how to improve the way you work with reporting when working from outside the office.

Researching

Depending on the company you work for and their requirements on encryption and use of internet during your workdays you might need to use a VPN connection during your research work.

General Meeting

Most meetings can be conducted using a video link and most video meeting platforms also offer the ability to call in without activating video both using their mobile app, web app, local software on your computer and via normal phone call.

Some of the most used platforms are:

• Zoom meetings https://zoom.us/
• Google hangout https://hangouts.google.com/
• Skype https://www.skype.com/
• Webex https://www.webex.com/

Workshop

Conducting a workshop online might not always be the best way to go but depending on the situation it might be the only way to do it so here are a few tools I have used very successfully over the years.

Brainstorming and collaboration tools:

• Trello https://trello.com/
• MindMeister https://mindmeister.com/
• Slack https://slack.com/
• IdeaFlip https://ideaflip.com/
• Ideaboard https://ideaboardz.com/

Cloud-based collaborative document editors like

• Office 365 https://www.office.com/
• Google Apps https://gsuite.google.com/
• Dropbox Paper https://www.dropbox.com/paper
• Quip https://quip.com/

Decision-making tools:

• Mentimeter https://www.mentimeter.com/
• 1000minds https://www.1000minds.com/

Creating presentation

• Office 365 https://www.office.com/
• Google Apps https://gsuite.google.com/
• Zoho Office https://www.zoho.com/office/
• Beautiful.AI https://www.beautiful.ai/
• Prezi https://prezi.com/
• Visme https://www.visme.co/
• Adobe Spark https://spark.adobe.com/

In the next article, we will cover tools in the next following topics.

• Budget planning
• Planning / Project management
• Team meeting
• Developing
• Case update
• Customer / Client meeting

And the list goes on...

But more importantly, there are tools that you might not be able to access outside the office which you need to plan for, either to find a way to work with when you are outside the office using a VPN tunnel or something similar or decide that they are not critical for your daily operation.

What other tools are you using, and what other tools do you need?

The more I know about your concerns and your situation the more I can help you find solutions so let me know by commenting or sending me a PM.

Be sure to share this article with your network to help whoever needs to work from home and how they can do that transition as smoothly as possible.

The previous article can be found here:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/corona-triggers-worlds-largest-work-from-home-karl-lillrud-/