4 essential tools to help your team work from home

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Working remotely, presents new challenges for staying connected and in touch with colleagues and customers.

Making sure your team is in regular contact during work-from-home arrangements is a vital part of boosting morale and maintaining a strong culture. There’s an abundance of task-management, communication and file-sharing apps that you can easily access to keep work flowing smoothly and the team in good spirits.

Here are four tech tools to help you get the job done.

#1 Task-management apps

Online communication tools such as Slack and Trello assists your team with an overview of tasks that need to attention. You can see how individual projects are progressing, what tasks individual team members are focused on. They also allow you to follow conversations easily. Tools like this also help connect employees and remind them of your shared work vision.

Also read: Work from home could hasten demise of email, says Slack CEO

Slack is also an ideal tool for building community, cohesion and cooperation within your team. It allows you to set up dedicated channels on the platform. Even if they are not all strictly work topics, this can help employees feel as if they’re having the sorts of conversations they often have at work.

#2 Video conferencing

When your team won’t be seeing each other in the flesh, video calling technology helps everyone stay connected. Video conferencing technology like Zoom is ideal for this – enabling virtual face-to-face meetings – that can also be recorded and shared later.

Although if you’re concerned about the security issues Zoom has been experiencing recently, ClickMeeting is another viable option.

#3 File sharing

Online tools like Google Docs allows multiple users to create, share and edit documents in real time. Any changes to documents are synced and saved in the Cloud, so you’ll never be second guessing yourself on where you saved the latest version

#4 Screen recording

On occasion, it’s likely you’ll need to show a colleague what you’re talking about or step them through a problem. You can use a screen recording tool such as Loom, or Google Hangouts, to capture your screen, voice and face as you explain something. It’s particularly handy when a workmate isn’t available at the same time as you – such as if you’re in different time zones.

While it may initially feel a little overwhelming to work and communicate with your team remotely, there are many tools and resources available that make it feasible and easy to maintain good communication and teamwork.

Parts of this article first appeared on the Seek website.