There are plenty of reasons today for companies to maintain a stay-at-home workforce. Some reasons for working from home include limited mobility, such as those with physical disabilities, or women who have just given birth, for example. Or you could simply maintain this arrangement in order to save on overheads such as a maintaining a physical office space.
If you’ve considered this, the good news is that technology improvements are making this arrangement easier and easier to set up. Software has become cheaper, with many good free alternatives, and connectivity is the fastest and cheapest it’s been. Here are some tools to keep your virtual office humming.
1. File sharing and collaboration:
Sending files to coworkers can be a pain, especially if they are email attachments, because updated versions often get confused with existing copies. Here are some ways to keep everything in sync.
Dropbox
Dropbox is one of the big names in this space. It creates a virtual drive on your hard drive that you can sync to the cloud.
Imagine a common file cabinet accessible by all. Every time it’s opened and files are updated, the next person opening the file can pick up where someone left off. Dropbox replicates this scenario virtually, where everybody has one shared folder that is synced all together. The files are seamlessly downloaded every time you are connected to the Internet. As a result, you can make changes to documents and send colleagues files and everybody automatically has the latest copies.
Google Docs or SingTel ONEOffice
Google Docs is an online Office suite from Google. It’s meant to act like a virtual working space, and you can share documents with colleagues. Once connected, they can work on the same document simultaneously from the browser, without having to email different versions back and forth.
For an enterprise version with added functions, you can consider a supported version such as SingTel ONEOffice.
Insync
Insync is a downloadable plug in that allows Google Docs files to be available offline. It also helps convert Google Docs files to Microsoft Office file formats, which suits companies working with outside contractors who are still on those file formats. It works on Windows and Mac, and is priced at US$9.99 per Google Account.
Basecamp
Basecamp is a little more than a simple file sharing site. The project management site allows you to maintain a to-do list and keep text documents available to all employees. This can be useful for training guides when a new employee joins, for example.
It also offers time tracking and a messaging system between employees.
2. Video chatting
Sometimes phone calls aren’t sufficient. We need eye contact and other visual cues from the other person to get a closer sense of how the other person is feeling. For that, a video call can be a virtual substitute, allowing us to chat as if we were on a phone call, but with the added medium of a live video stream.
Google Hangouts
Google Hangouts is Google’s video chatting service. It allows users to get into a “hangout”, or video chat for free, and it can stitch a group of users together into a virtual room for a chat. The software is smart enough to detect who is speaking, and highlights that window to make it easier for participants to follow the group chat.
Skype
Skype is old hat at the video chatting game, having been one of the pioneers of the service. Its service is available for free, but it has a premium service that allows group video calls, group screen sharing and unlimited outgoing calls to landline phones. Group screen sharing is especially useful for remote presentations.
3. Social networks
Social networks are online spaces where people can connect with each other and swap updates on their lives, such as through photos or little status updates. One of the most widely used networks is Facebook.
But Facebook isn’t just for leisure time. Companies can keep its culture going by maintaining a company social network group, either as a private group on Facebook for free, or by using a more robust enterprise service meant for companies, such as Yammer or Convo.
The benefits of social networks are that it allows you to share links dynamically with colleagues. Younger workers who have grown up on a diet of Facebook and Twitter are more likely to adapt to these interfaces quickly, and feel at home interacting with colleagues that way. Sometimes it’s more friendly to “like” a status update than send back a staid email saying “noted”.
4. Persistent instant messaging
Instant messaging tools are useful, but sometimes you need a way to catch up on a discussion if you aren’t at your computer. These tools provide instant messaging functions, but can list content that you’ve missed into a bulletin board format, so that workers can log in later and be up to speed on discussions.
There are some popular names in this space: Campfire and HipChat. They allow project managers to set up groups and broadcast messages, but also for private messages to be exchanged in real-time.
5. Online mindmapping and idea creation
One element missing from being able to meet up and go into a conference room together is being able to draw out a large plan on the whiteboard and discuss it. Online mindmapping tools like Mindmeister and Lucidchart allow users to visualise their thought process with a group and share their creations via email.
When users are added to the mindmap, they too can add to it, and collaborate in real-time, allowing decisions to be made together. Users that are added late to the chat can replay an entire mindmapping session to be brought up to speed, and to understand how the eventual ideas were brainstormed.