Work From Home Essentials

WORK FROM HOME ESSENTIALS

Ah, offices, who doesn’t miss their office? Wait, do people really miss their office? You got to be kidding us. Why would someone miss their office?

Understandably, your work is the main source of your daily bread and butter and this time isolation might get a little scary for many. Agreeing to the fact that things may be a bit hard, but they’re not impossible, right? For most of the service based industry work from home is a possibility.

We have sorted the functionality and needs of several departments and how you can manage your responsibilities while working remotely.

We recommend you to go through everything because there are several awesome tools mentioned throughout the blog which might come handy to you regardless of your profile.

CEO (Chief Executive Officer)

Can also be known as the head of the company. Being a CEO is not easy. They’ve got an entire company to run and are the role model of all the employees. They have to stay tough in a hard time like these so that the morale of everyone stays high. It’s well said somewhere ‘with great powers comes great responsibilities’. Some of the main tasks of the CEO are

1. Staying in Touch:

Communication is the key, whether it’s with the clients or with the team. A CEO has to look all around throughout his company to make sure the work is running efficiently without any hindrances. They also have to resolve major client issues. Some of the tools they can use are:

1.a Staying in Touch with Team:

• Trello: Trello lets you work more collaboratively and get more done. You can check on to your team’s work progress and can alter any changes you’d like to see. Whether it’s for work, a side project or even the next family vacation, Trello helps your team stay organized. Also, you can dive into the details by adding comments, attachments, due dates, and more directly to Trello cards. Collaborate on projects from beginning to end.

Price: Free

• Zoom: Zoom is one of the most popular free software applications worldwide. It is used for telecommuting, distance education, and social relations. Analysts claim that it is more reliable and easier to use than competitors. Zoom has received many awards. This is an important tool especially for remotely working teams where face to face meetings are just not possible most of the time.

Price: Use of the platform is free for video conferences of up to 100 participants, with a 40-minute time limit. For longer or larger conferences with more features, paid subscriptions are available, costing $15-20 per month.

• Slack: Think of Slack as your messaging app or WhatsApp and combine it with your official email, and now multiply its functionality by 10. The company claims “You could get buried in email. Or you could get real work done in Slack.” and we can’t agree anymore.

1. Why Slack over email? In your inbox, seeing all the conversations about a single project requires sifting through many different email chains. In Slack, you’ll save time by seeing all the discussions and files about a project in one place: a channel. Also, Slack gives you access to real-time conversations with any teammate or team. Unlike email, where every new message is weighted alike, it’s easy to grab a specific someone’s attention with a notification when you need a quick response.
2. Why Slack over messaging apps? These have limited functionality with other apps — Slack connects with all of your work tools, so you can find information or perform quick actions without leaving conversations.

Price: Free to $12.50/month

1.b Staying in Touch with Clients:

• Skype: Zoom could be used for this purpose as well, but since it is a relatively new company, there are chances your clients might not be using it. Thus, Skype. The old school video calling app which is still running smooth and flawlessly. It specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches over the Internet. Skype also provides instant messaging services. Users may transmit text, video, audio and images. Skype allows video conference calls. Skype today is used by 100 million people on a monthly basis and 40 million people use it daily. Skype-to-Skype calls are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones are charged.

Price: Freemium

• Google Slides: Presentations are an important part of the meetings. A lot more can be explained via a presentation than a normal video call. According to the studies, a presentation has more than double chances to claim a client then a simple audio or video call. And when we’re talking about presentations, we can’t think of anything else than Google Slides.

Google Slides is available as a web application, mobile app for Android, iOS, Windows, BlackBerry, and as a desktop application on Google’s ChromeOS. The app is compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint file formats. Slides allow users to create and edit presentations online while collaborating with other users in real-time. Edits are tracked by the user with a revision history that tracks changes to the presentation.

Not just that, many free interactive aesthetically pleasing templates are available for users to kick start their projects.

Price: Free

2. Making Strategies:

Being the root of the company, it’s up to the CEO to take all the big decisions regarding the company. Having an entire team to get ideas and brainstorming, a CEO might have many inflows of the ideas but not every idea is worth it or key points from multiple ideas leads us to a strong strategy and that’s where noting and making to-do lists come handy, where you can jot down all the incoming ideas and then filter them out according to the needs of the company.

• Evernote: Need to note something? Calm down, find a pen and a paper. What? The pen is not working? Hurry up, the idea might be slipping out. And by the time you find a p working pen, the idea is far gone. That’s why we recommend Evernote, the all in one journaling app. You can note down whatever you want, whenever you want. The app has a very pleasing look and comes with features like to-do list created and security check-in so that your ideas remain to yourself.

Alternative: Google Keep.

Price: Freemium. Free to $7.99/month.

• MindJet: Mindjet is just the app that you are looking for as a CEO to use during meetings, discussions and brainstorming sessions. You can create a visual representation of your ideas and present them when needed. This application fulfils the concept of mind mapping for generating ideas.

Price: Windows: $349. iOS: $199.

Upgrades: Windows: $179. iOS: $99.

3. Managing Workflow

Working from home is a different thing and not working at all is different. Though it has been proven that working from home increases productivity of the employees, the doubt of insecurity still exists. So it’s important to keep an eye on the team on a regular basis by checking and managing their workflow. Some helpful app can be:

• Asana: With Asana’s work management platform, your team can stay focused on their goals, projects, and tasks — no matter when or where they work.

1. Plan and structure work in a way that’s best for you.
2. Set priorities and deadlines.
3. Follow projects and tasks through every stage.
4. Create visual project plans to see how every step maps out over time.
5. Pinpoint risks. Eliminate roadblocks. Even when the plan changes.

Pricing: Free to 24.99/month.

• Calendly: Working from home doesn’t mean one is available all the time. People tend to forget the ‘work’ part from ‘work from home’. Calendly allows you to schedule all the calls and meetings and whatnot with whomsoever. It’s very clean design makes it pretty easy to use.

Price: Free to $15 per user/month.

• Fantastical: It’s an awesome tool which can translate language like “dinner at 7 p.m. next Thursday” into calendar events. “It places a calendar icon in my menu bar,” says a user, “and I can use natural language to add new items to my calendar without having to switch windows.” Containing features like documents attachment, pleasing themes, calendar sets, and is fully localized in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. (only for iOS)

Price: $4.99/month

4. Staying Sane

If the CEO is calm, the company is composed. That’s why it’s important for the CEO to stay sane in these times when it’s comparatively tough to get business for your firm. Meditation is said to be one of those practices which keep us calm and as a CEO if you’re not meditating, you’re missing out on a lot. Along with mental fitness, physical fitness is important as well.

• Headspace: Headspace is an app, specializing in meditation. Meditation is one’s way to achieve mindfulness. What’s mindfulness? It’s a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique. As boring as it sounds, mediation is one of those things which gives a happy result in the long run.

Price: $12.99/month

• DownDog: The Down Dog App provides a studio-like yoga experience in the comfort of your home. Yoga is very important in this hectic life of days as it has various benefits as it improves respiration, energy and vitality, maintains a balanced metabolism, weight reduction, cardio and circulatory health, increases muscle strength and tone etc. We believe that this quarantine is the right time to develop this habit which benefits in the long run and there’s no better app than DownDog.

Price: $7.99/month

HR (Human Resources)

Let’s be honest, many people think that HR’s job is the easiest in the entire firm. People tend to feel like all HRs do is plan events which interests no one. First of all, these events are very important for the firm. One may feel like they’re a waste of time, but the changes it brings subtly to the relation between the employees is proven by science. Here are some work from home essentials for HR.

1. Recruitment:

Staying in isolation doesn’t mean people aren’t looking for a job or your company isn’t hiring. Most of the service-based companies are not facing huge difficulties during this quarantine when compared to product-based companies. Thus, if you’re an HR, you can recruit people directly from your home.

• LinkedIn: With Recruiter, your team can:

1. Access LinkedIn’s entire network of active and passive candidates.
2. Use search filters to zero in on the best candidates.
3. See up to 1,000 profiles in search results, compared to only 100 in a Basic (free) personal account.
4. Synchronize your team’s activities with shared projects, searches, profiles, and candidate notes.
5. Contact candidates through InMail, LinkedIn’s trusted messaging environment.
6. Post jobs.

Price: Free to $119.95/month

• Interview Assistant: A fantastic tool for conducting interviews and hiring staff. This mobile app has several features which help interviewers organize, structure and prepare their interviews. You have full flexibility when it comes to design and you can create an unlimited number of your questions or select any of the 250 pre-set questions for the interview if you run out of ideas.

Price: Free with addition In-App Purchases.

• SmartRecruiters: Their mobile app covers the whole spectrum of the recruitment process, from managing and responding candidates on the go to approving jobs and offers. It has a very clean but effective user interface and allows users to scroll through candidates and reviews the same as they would when using social networks like LinkedIn.

Price: $10K/year

Similar Tools: Madgex, TurboHire, Mentornity

2. Managing Employee Relations

A team that plays together, succeeds together. That’s why good employee relations are a very important factor for a firm to perform good, and maintaining it is one of the main tasks of HR. Some helpful tools can be

• HouseParty: Houseparty is the face-to-face social network where you can connect with the people you care about most. The app makes video chat effortless, alerting you when your friends are “in the house” and ready to chat so you can jump right into the conversation. There are various games embedded in the app which makes video calls even more fun.

Price: Free

• Tambola: Aka Housie. Remember we used to play this at every event. Every single event. It was the go-to game of the parties back when mobile devices were not such a big deal. Luckily, this game is back, this time, on mobile devices and is playable online. The best part about this is that even a team of a lot of members can play it without any problem.

Price: Free

• Gartic.io: We all have played dumb charades, haven’t we? Well, Gartic.io is somewhat similar to dumb charades, the only difference is that the player has to draw the word given to him/her instead of acting. And all the other members have to guess the word. This is a very fun and interactive game which will surely give your team a good time.

Price: Free

3. Training And Development

Working from home gives a great chance to work at whatever time you want to work and also gives us loads of free time to do the things we like. One thing we can do is learn something new. Since training and development is one of the huge tasks for the HR, these tools can help HRs recommend various courses to the employees by which they can learn new things and stay up to date with the technology.

• Udemy: Udemy is an online learning platform aimed at professional adults and students. As of Jan 2020, the platform has more than 50 million students and 57,000 instructors teaching courses in over 65 languages. There have been over 295 million course enrollments. That being said, one can learn whatever they want from Udemy and the courses are not very expensive as well. It’s a very affordable option for learning.

Free: $9-50/course

• LinkedIn Learning: LinkedIn Learning is a website offering video courses taught by industry experts in software, creative, and business skills. It is said to be the best website for learning whatever the corporate world requires, whether it’s some sort of coding language or how to manage a team efficiently.

Price: Price of LinkedIn Premium

• Coursera: Coursera is an online learning platform that offers massive open online courses, specializations, and degrees. Every course on Coursera is taught by top instructors from world-class universities and companies, so you can learn something new anytime, anywhere. Hundreds of free courses give you access to on-demand video lectures, homework exercises, and community discussion forums. Paid courses provide additional quizzes and projects as well as a shareable Course Certificate upon completion.

Price: Starting from $39.

4. Planning and Organization

These two aspects are an important part of an HR’s job. These are the processes of understanding the needs of the company and making any necessary changes to meet company goals and objectives. This planning is important to the success of the company; and factors like growth, change, and technology needs to be considered in the process.

• Google Calendar: Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. It is a great free tool to plan events for the company. Whether it’s to schedule a call with a team member or to remind an employee to submit the document, Google Calendar helps in managing all of it.

Price: Free

Similar Apps: Calendly, Fantastical

Marketing Team

Technically, this is the team (with the sales department which keeps a company running. Because if you guys, the customers get to know about the value of the products, their usage and additional info that might be helpful to the customers. It creates brand awareness and makes the business stand out. In short, you are heroes of the company. Here are some work from home essentials for the marketing team.

1. Surveys

Surveys give you actionable insights and fresh perspectives. These remain the top source of market information for marketers. It’s because of the surveys they get the total insight of what actually is going through the public’s mind and what they’re thinking so that strategies can be made according to that.

• Google Form: Create a new survey and edit it with others at the same time. Choose from a variety of pre-made themes or create your own. Free with a Google account.

Price: Free

• SurveyMonkey: Though these are not free, they provide a lot of in-depth analysis from your surveys. Some of the benefits are:

1. Get access to survey templates that speak to customers, employees, or your target audience.
2. Choose from expert-written sample questions to include in your surveys.
3. Score your surveys to estimate their success rates with SurveyMonkey Genius.
4. Explore their best practices for creating even the most sophisticated surveys.

• SurveyBot: Chatbots are the need of the hour. Create surveys using SurveyBot’s chatbot survey builder and seamlessly deploy to Facebook Messenger. With 12+ question types, advanced conversational logic, answer piping, re-engagement rules and loads more features. You can create your very own conversational surveys and get better results from your respondents.

Price: From 50 responses for $3/month to 25K responses for $549/month.

2. Tracking Trends

Not going to lie, it does feel good when you’re able to predict something. Well, did you ever give it a thought how marketers are mostly able to predict the trend and strategies activities according to it? The truth is, a good marketer knows where and how to look for the information. Here are some sources and tools you can add up to your list and strengthen your marketing game.

• Google Alerts and Trends: These are the go-to tools for any marketer in the business. By Google Alerts one can monitor the web for interesting new content. How often. As-it-happens. At most once a day. At most once a week. Anyhow you like. And by Google Trends you can analyze the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.

Price: Free

• Trendsmap: This tool has been specifically designed for Twitter. Trendsmap shows you the latest Twitter trending hashtags and topics from anywhere in the world. Analyse and visualise any topic, hashtag, word, user, or tweet in detail.

Price: Free

• BuzzFeed: BuzzFeed has breaking news, vital journalism, quizzes, videos, celeb news, Tasty food videos, recipes, DIY hacks, and all the trending buzz you’ll want to share with your audience. It focuses more on the interactive side of marketing instead of all numbers, figures and graphs.

Price: Free

3. Social Media

It remains a big domain for marketers, especially in times of isolation., because most of the people are either Netflixing or scrolling through their social media. Analyze and visualize any topic, hashtag, word, user, or tweet in detail. Explore back hours, days, weeks, and even months.

• Planable: If your marketing team is in a hierarchical form, this is a stool for you. Planable is the command center of social media campaigns trusted by agencies, freelancers, and marketing teams to create, collaborate, approve and schedule. Various roles can be distributed to different team members and the work goes on flawlessly.

Price: $39/month

• Mention: Did you know that every second, on an average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter, which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year. You can’t possibly keep up on your own. Mention’s Twitter tracking is just as real-time as the social network itself, and you can connect your Twitter account to Mention to engage and start conversations without leaving your dashboard.

Price: $29/month

• Hootsuite: It can help you in:

1. Keep your social presence active 24/7 by automatically scheduling hundreds of social media posts at once, across your social accounts.
2. Stay on message with pre-approved content your teams can post, stored in your favorite cloud file service. Tagging, searching, and usage stats make curating content a breeze.
3. Track your performance and share meaningful insights with your team about customers and campaign content using customizable, easy-to-create reports.
4. Find and filter social conversations by keyword, hashtag, and location—in multiple languages—to hear what people are saying about your brand, competitors, and industry.

Price: $19-499/month

Sales Dept.

You should be proud of being a part of the sales team. Why? Sales teams not only increase revenue but they also have a strong impact on brand reputation, long-term customer relationships, retention of customers and overall business growth. In easy words, a company runs because of you guys. Here are some work from home essentials for the sales department.

1. Customer Service

Lockdown doesn’t mean that your services aren’t being used by your users. In fact, there’s a possibility that it is being used more than ever. And this is when you can get more number of queries from the customers. So you have to stay ever ready, no matter how customers want to contact you with whatever query or complaint.

• ChatBots: Love them or hate them, chatbots are here to stay. Chatbots have become extraordinarily popular in recent years largely due to dramatic advancements in machine learning and other underlying technologies such as natural language processing. Today’s chatbots are smarter, more responsive, and more useful – and we’re likely to see even more of them in the coming years.

Some common chatbot service providers are ManyChat, Chatfuel, Dialogflow and Botsify.

• Aircall: Customer support via calls is one of the most used options chosen by customers for their queries, make sure you don’t lack in that area of service. Aircall is a virtual call center and a cloud phone system. Imagine it as a call center, but instead, everything you need is on your computer. It’s easily connected to your CRM. That’s it. That’s how easy it is to use AirCall.

Price: $30-50/month

• Pure Chat: You know what, millennials? Yes, they love nothing more than texting and just rolling their fingers over their devices. According to the patterns, more millennials prefer texting over calling. That’s where Pure Chat comes in handy. It’s a chat software for your business. One of the easiest and fastest way to add chat on your website. It can easily automate lead capture, appointment scheduling and payments. Some of the features are:

1. Unlimited Chats
2. Up to 3 operators for free
3. Powerful operator dashboard
4. Customizable widget
5. Native iOS & Android apps
6. Lead Capture
7. Schedule Appointments
8. Accept Payments
9. Get Notified by Email, App, Zapier, or SMS (PRO)
10. Hosted ArtiBot Pages

Price: Free to $79/month.

2. Customer Retention

Ok, your services are very eye-catching and you’ve got a bunch of customers. You’d probably want to keep them as your customers instead of them turning into customers of your rivals. That’s customer retention. And it’s one of the main aspects of businesses. There are high chances that you can sell your service/products to an older customer than a new one. That’s why customer retention is an important part of running a successful business.

• Loyalty Reward Program: Loopy Loyalty: The more a customer uses your services, the more loyalty points they get and they can use these loyalty points later on your services. Loopy Loyalty helps you in creating a loyalty reward system.

Some of its key features are:

1. - Access the native capabilities of Apple Wallet and Google Pay.
2. - Send tantalizing, personalized, provocative messages directly to your customers’ lock screen. You choose who to target.
3. - Measure the real, financial benefits of your digital loyalty program.
4. - Every Loopy Loyalty transaction is written to the secure database.
5. - Automatically trigger location-based notifications when your customers are near your location(s).

Price: $18-65/month

• Discounts Provider: Groupon: Who doesn’t love discounts? Everyone does. Your customers as well. So why not use some discount strategies to attract them? Groupon helps us in that. Groupon Coupons brings everything you love about the pioneering money-saving platform to the world of promo codes. Over the past 10 years—they’ve been able to deliver 100% real promo codes and coupons for thousands of stores.

Pricing: Groupon does not charge an upfront fee to create and run deals on their site. Instead, they collect 50% of the sale of each voucher.

• Subscription Provider :Chargebee: Chargebee is the leading subscription billing software powering end-to-end recurring billing, subscription management & auto invoicing service provider.

Price: Starting from $299/month

3. Budget Preparation

What’s the sales department without a budget? Budget preparation is an important job for a sales team, after all, they’re the source of the incoming finances and have to look at it.

• Scoro: One good thing about this is, it just doesn’t manage budgets but everything. No doubt, budget management is one of their specialties and so is time management, Scoro provides all the tools you need to fully manage your business: project management, work scheduling & tracking, task boards & lists, contact database & CRM.

Price: Starting from $28/month

• Centage: Centage’s Planning Maestro empowers you to make faster, more informed decisions, so you can react quickly to market changes, take calculated risks, and capitalize on new opportunities. Build flexible, driver-based plans, forecast likely financial performance, analyze results, and share critical information across the business. Build a driver-based budget model in days. Test multiple scenarios, generate accurate, automated forecasts, and enforce your chart of accounts.

With that being said, we hope that you manage to work from home just fine as you used to work from the office. Stay home, stay safe.