Nowadays, working from home has become more and more popular. It is true it is an ideal solution when you are regularly on the move, when there is a need to look after your children or in cases of exceptional situations like transport strikes or being in confinement in case of a virus; your presence in the office isn’t always essential.
However, to stay productive whilst working from home, it is essential to use the right tools so that you can: follow the progress of projects in real time, collaborate and communicate with your team, and perform well.
Here are 5 tools that are indispensable to efficiently work remotely:Â
Instant messaging
When working from home, it is imperative that everyone keeps in contact with their team and manager. On the one hand, this allows for maintaining communication and collaboration at the heart of a team. On the other hand, it avoids people feeling isolated.
It can be seen that emails are not at all adapted to this type of interaction. Therefore, what you need is a chat, to maintain a dialogue between your team and manager at any given time. You can ask questions, give feedback on certain topics, send documents of any kind (e.g. Text, images, video, audio) and share your moods with emoticons. As for an oral dialogue, you participate in a real and instantaneous exchange and you obtain responses immediately.
Notifications inform you as soon as have received a message. The chat allows you to be more efficient and productive while avoiding clogging up your mailbox.
Video conferencing
Sometimes, instant messaging isn’t adapted to discussions on delicate situations or when trying to address a potential problem. An audio or video call then seems to be a more appropriate solution. Additionally, it’s nice to be able to see your team in person whenever you want when you are working remotely.
For example, in the case of confinement, you can easily organise a meeting with the tool Wimi AirTime, with full confidentiality. You are not required to install anything. All you have to do is launch the application directly from your browser. You can invite whomever you would like because no account creation is required, all you need to do is share a link to AirTime.
The other major asset of this tool is the screen-sharing function. You can easily bring your team together remotely to discuss a key document, make collective corrections on a file or assist a collaborator who is having a technical difficulty.Â
Document sharing
When you work from home, it is important to have access to all the files and documents that you need without outside help. Wimi Drive allows you to access all your documents simply from your computer, no matter where you are and whether you are connected to the internet or not.
What’s more, you have access to all your documents that you can share quickly and easily with your team, clients and partners. Need to send a file that is too large to be sent by email? All you have to do is send a download link to the recipients.
You can equally create a space to share secure files with personalised arborescence. Above all, you can control access to these sensitive documents by creating a password.
Another asset of Wimi is automatic versioning which allows you to always be able to access the latest version of each document, whilst facilitating access to older versions at the same time.
Shared calendar
Here we have an indispensable tool for managing your projects and efficiently organising your days when working from home. The shared calendar offers a global view of the key events in a project. You visualise the milestones and the key dates of your projects as well as the due-dates of your tasks.
Set up notifications to stay informed on when the due-date of a task is approaching. Easily organise meetings and events with your team, clients and suppliers, even from home, thanks to the video conferencing tool. Visualise the availabilities of participants and propose a convenient time slot for everybody avoiding tedious email threads. Finally, programme in your reminders to avoid latecomers.
With the shared calendar, a project manager can view the work of each member in their team at a glance, whether they are in the office next door or working remotely.
Task management
Whether you are working remotely or not, planning is an indispensable step in guaranteeing the success of your projects. The Gantt chart is a simple tool, visual and ergonomic, which allows for efficient planning of all the tasks necessary to complete your project.
A task management tool allows you to see all tasks; tasks that need to be carried out, tasks in progress and completed tasks. At a glance, you can identify overdue tasks and act quickly to manage deadlines. You know where you are up to and you can request help from your colleagues if you’re worried you won’t be able to meet the deadline.
Thanks to this tool, you can consult the history of a task to understand its’ development from creation to completion. It is also possible to add a comment on a task in order to communicate directly with the responsible person.
In summary
You’ve got it, the collaborative platform Wimi brings together all the indispensable tools to promote collaboration and communication with your team, and therefore to work from home efficiently.
Test it for free for 14 days to see for yourself.
Bonus: follow our 7 tips to stay productive whilst working remotely.
