Winning at Working Remotely: An Exploration of Essential Digital Tools
Remote work has become very popular. One of the main reasons is that it is really good for a healthy work-life balance and productivity. Being in the comfort of your home and doing your work on your own terms is liberating.
But for people who are new to remote work, things can seem a little challenging at first. They may question how they will cooperate with the office and all the people there, or other remote workers on their team. Other questions may also arise depending on the type of their job and the tasks they have to do.
So, let’s see how you can improve your remote work environment and make your work-life balance even better.
Essential Digital Tools for Remote Working
Today we are going to look at some essential tools for remote work. These tools will help you start remote work easily and collaborate with your office counterparts.
Communication Tools
First off, we have communication tools. Remote work is highly dependent on the means and methods of communication. Without proper communication remote work fails miserably. In an office, it’s really easy to just go up and talk to your superiors and coworkers if you need to ask them something. But that is not the case for remote work. So, how can remote workers meet and talk with their superiors and coworkers? Well with mobile phones and internet-capable devices.
Thankfully, it is the age of the internet, and connecting with people is really easy. There are numerous free and paid tools where people can connect with and talk to each other. Platforms like Zoom, and Slack are great for communication.
Video communication tools like Zoom allow remote workers to give presentations by sharing their screens with the meeting participants. Slack on the other hand is great for sharing files, text communication, and for teams to collaborate without barging into other people’s space.
So, such platforms are great for contacting members of the team, or the boss without any trouble.
Project Management Tools
Of course, management is the next most important thing for work after communication. How do you receive new tasks, provide updates on ongoing tasks, and submit old ones? And who or what keeps track of all of these things? These are all necessary things for working properly.
So, this is where tools that can help with these tasks are required. These tools let managers and team leaders do the following things:
- Delegate tasks to their teams
- Check the status of ongoing tasks.
- Receive updates on tasks.
- Monitor the employees to see whether they are working or not.
- Send and receive files and documents from relevant personnel.
- Create whiteboards for announcements or group activities.
Many tools like these exist. Some great examples are Trello and Asana. Employers can provide these tools to their remote workers and help them to stay integrated with their office.
Productivity Tools
Remote workers have a lot of freedom. This means they can use different tools and technologies to work how they like. Utilizing productivity tools is usually a great idea in this situation.
Now productivity tools can be any tool that helps remote workers work more efficiently. That means that the tool helps the remote worker save time and effort, to enable them to do more work. In the realm of hardware that enhances productivity, it’s also worth considering the quality and reliability of your equipment. For instance, a stable internet connection is fundamental for remote workers. In this regard, solutions from reliable providers like Rhino Networks can be instrumental in ensuring seamless connectivity and efficient remote work. Their range of accessories, such as the Meraki AC Power Cord, is designed to enhance the performance of your networking devices, making sure you stay connected when it matters most.
A good example of such a tool is the Google Workspace. Now, strictly speaking, this is a suite of tools rather than a single tool. It lets users access their mail, cloud storage, word processor, excel sheets, slides, a virtual whiteboard, and even a website creator.
Having so many tools under one space is really helpful and saves time that would have been spent navigating between different apps. Basically, any tool that can save time can be classified as a productivity tool. By this definition, even an image to text converter is a productivity tool because it is much faster than manual transcription. This image to text tool can be specifically very handy if your job requires a lot of data entry like entering invoices and bills into the database.
Writing Tools
No matter what kind of job one has, this is for certain, they have to write. People with field jobs have to write reports and applications, and those with office jobs have to write proposals and plans.
So, writing is always required somehow. That’s why remote workers must use tools that can help them write. Typically, issues in writing are due to a lack of clarity and the use of unorthodox words and phrases. These can become an impediment to use comprehension.
Remote workers don’t have access to editors and the like, so they have to remove these problems themselves. They can do that with the help of tools. Rewriting tools such as the ones by Editpad and Article Rewriter are great for dealing with these issues. Tools like these can automatically rewrite any given content and make it clearer as well as remove small grammar issues. Remote workers need to use such tools to streamline and improve their work-related writing tasks.
Conclusion
So, remote workers should be provided with four types of tools so that their productivity is not affected. The four types of tools are necessary to win at remote work. Companies should try to provide their remote workers with these tools. That way remote workers will become a bigger asset.
