Pro Tools to Run Your Business Remotely While Working From Home

Employers who are not used to having their workforce work remotely have been scrambling to establish a plan that ensures employees can be productive from home with little disruption to their business. 

There’s no doubt that the radical changes we've gone through will fundamentally shift how we do business. Employees will likely push employers to allow them to work from home so that they can improve their work-life balance. However, for this to happen, this crisis proves that work needs to continue to push through no matter anyone’s location — the people, their jobs and their businesses depend on it. 

In response to the current global crisis, a growing number of organizations and companies are offering free or heavily discounted services to help businesses — and a newly remote workforce — survive the next several months. 

Below is a list of a few software companies that can help you and your business. I personally work with and use each software here and can vouch for how amazing they are!

• PandaDoc, the leading document automation software for small and medium-sized businesses, launched a free e-signature plan. The free plan includes unlimited document uploads, unlimited eSignatures and payment processing. 
• Calendar is a software I personally developed to help people be more productive with their time. Free pro trial for 90 days.
• Google announced that it is offering free access to its advanced Hangout Meets product for all G-Suite customers and G-Suite for education customers. Hangout Meets enables calls of up to 250 people and also allows meetings to be recorded and saved on Google Drive. 
• Teamwork, a project management software, is offering its services free to schools for the rest of 2020. It includes a product to assign homework, share files and resources, and a chat feature.
• Guru is a knowledge-management solution for teams of all sizes. Small teams can get started with instant access to up-to-date knowledge for free, and expert-level plans are only $24 per month per user.
• Facebook provides a product called Workplace Advanced, that provides users with an internal version of Facebook that includes features like video calling and file sharing. It will provide the service for free until June 30 for all new customers. 
• CloudApp is an asynchronous business communication that allows your team to use instantly shareable videos, screenshots and GIFS. CloudApp has varying plans to meet you and your team's needs (including free) and offers its premium Pro plan free of charge to higher education institutions. 
• Support.com is offering free tech support to anyone working or studying remotely right now.
• CloudFlare, a web-performance and security company, is offering CloudFlare for Teams free for businesses of all sizes. 
• Atlassian, which provides a tool for team-collaboration, is making its flagship products Jira and Confluence free for teams of up to ten indefinitely. Atlassian is also offering K-12 schools and higher education institutions free one-year subscriptions to its Trello Business Class service, which can be used by teachers to schedule coursework and other activities.
• Box is making its business edition of its software free for 90 days.
• Airtable, which offers online database and spreadsheets, is offering any non-political, humanitarian effort tackling COVID-19 to use Airtable Pro for free for the next three months. The company also plans to make the service free for students too.
• Dialpad, a cloud-based phone system and video conferencing service, is giving away its Dialpad Talk Pro product for free for the first two months to any business in North America and Japan. 
• Microsoft is offering Microsoft Teams for free for the next six months.
• Cisco’s Webex is enhancing its free Webex accounts to support unlimited usage and up to 100 people per meeting. Webex is also offering a free 90-day trial to new customers.
• Chatfuel, a chatbot platform for Facebook Messenger, is giving free access to all Pro plan features for organizations that are offering emergency aid. In addition, the platform is offering free weekly onboarding and live office hours for those who need help setting up their Messenger bot. This service was previously for VIP customers only.  
• Okta launched Okta for Emergency Remote Work, which offers core Okta services for free to all new customers for six months (with possible extensions based on the situation). 
• Instant Housecall is a remote support software for small IT businesses, and it's giving subscribers the ability to create sub-accounts that allow the user to take over their office's PC. 
• MailChimp, used by marketers to distribute email newsletters, is offering free accounts for its more feature-rich service to local governments, schools, healthcare providers, nonprofits and other organizations that need to communicate critical health information about the COVID-19 virus. 
• Vidyard accelerated its work on a service already in development that helps employees communicate with one another and allows employers to share video messages with their workforce. This service is now free through June 30. 
• Meero, a file transfer service, is increasing the storage capacity (10 Gigabytes) and validity duration (3 mos) of files shared via MeeroDrop. 
• Bill.com is allowing for a free 90-day subscription for new customers impacted by COVID-19. 
• Yext: is giving people a 90-day period for Yext Answers. Eligible businesses will be able to make their websites a search engine capable of answering consumers’ COVID-19 specific queries in real-time.

With so much uncertainty during this very stressful time, it’s encouraging to see this outpouring of support in the business world. The quick shift in the workspace has been tricky to navigate but, with a continually growing list of available resources, employees and businesses are finding ways to make it work.

Hopefully, these resources help businesses weather this storm with minimal damage and make it easier for others to recover once this is all over. 

John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, and startup enthusiast. He is a founder of the calendar productivity tool Calendar. You can sign up for early access to Calendar here!

This article originally appeared on Entrepreneur.