Due to the COVID pandemic, many companies have had no choice but to send their workers to work from home . Thus, millions of workers have had no choice but to start teleworking . And although it is true that the first weeks, even the first months, have been really chaotic, in the end everything has settled and even many companies have offered the possibility to their workers to continue working remotely.
We are going to focus on this specific issue because remote work or teleworking is something that many companies have implemented. The reason for all this is evident, since thanks to the Internet , today many people do not need to go to a physical office to fulfill their obligations. To this we add that teleworking is used as an emergency plan due to current restrictions.
Be that as it may, the first thing we need for all of this is to have a PC connected to the Internet, which is important in most cases. On the other hand, we must also take into account the programs that we will use in it. This is precisely what we will talk about next. And we are going to list some of the applications that could be considered essential for teleworking.
Each type of work requires specific programs. There will be teleworking in which just a web browser is enough, and others in which it will be necessary to use software developed by the company. However, regardless of the position or type of work we do, there will always be common tools that cannot be missing from any computer of people who choose to telecommute. These are.
A modern web browser to telecommute
The web browser is the gateway to the Internet. Windows has its own browser (Edge), and it allows us to install other browsers to be able to connect and navigate differently. Unless we have a very old computer, and without updating, surely we already have a good browser ready to accompany us on our telework day. Whether it is the new Edge Chromium , Google Chrome or Firefox , one of these programs must be yes or yes, on our PC. Our recommendation is to use a different browser for personal use and for telecommuting. So we can have our data well separated and improve our productivity.
We could also include a mail client here (Outlook, Windows 10 Mail, etc), but the truth is that from the browser we can check the mail much more quickly, so it is totally unnecessary.
Software to write and open all kinds of documents
Surely on more than one occasion we have to write a document to share it with another colleague, or open a document that is sent to us from another department. Therefore, we must have our computer ready to work, without complications, with all kinds of documents.
Microsoft‘s office suite, Office, is one of the essentials for any PC that we are going to use to work. With it we will not have problems to open or to write all kinds of Word documents, Excel sheets or slide presentations with PowerPoint. And in the case that we are going to work with PDF documents, a good viewer will be necessary that does not give us problems when opening all kinds of documents, as is the case with Adobe Reader .
And here you could not miss this complete office suite specially designed for group work and remote collaboration. It has the most common office programs such as a text editor , and another for creating spreadsheets , among others. It is true that in terms of functionality it cannot be compared with Microsoft’s Office, but this makes up for it with its ease in group work. It has a great commenting system and integrates seamlessly with other solutions in the Google ecosystem such as Gmail or Drive.
Chats and video calls: essential when working from home
When we are in an office we can talk to people face to face. But when working from home we have to choose an alternative as close as possible. And this alternative is video calls. With the advent of work from home, the use of all kinds of corporate chat platforms with video calling functionality has proliferated.
Depending on the software used by the company, here we may need some programs or others. Zoom , for example, is a quick solution for making video calls with many users at the same time. Microsoft Teams and Slack are two more text-chat-centric alternatives that also have video calling features. And of course, Google Meet for those quick, impromptu calls.
And who does not know this other software that has been with us for a good number of years and that is part of Microsoft’s solutions . It is especially suitable for communicating with other online users in different ways. In fact, it is more than ideal for videoconferencing both from the PC and from the mobile . This will allow us to hold remote meetings via the Internet between several co-workers , for example.
In addition, over the years it has not stopped growing and improving until it has become one of the benchmarks in the sector and suitable for teleworking.
Share files in the cloud with your colleagues
This is one of the many cloud storage services that we can use, perhaps the most popular. This, as you can imagine, will be very helpful when sharing large files, or many of these, over the Internet. It also offers us everything we need to share everything we save here with other users in a simple and direct way.
To all this we add that we have a free modality that solves the needs of the majority. But this is not the only solution of this type that we can use, we have many others. Likewise, OneDrive from Micosoft, or Drive from the search giant, Google, can also be useful.
Organizational problems? Calendars, agendas and sheets for teleworking
One of the main problems with working from home is a lack of organization. In a short time we can accumulate a lot of work and many appointments and we can reach a state of blockage in which we do not know where to start.
We can use calendars , such as Outlook or Google, and other types of programs that help us to have all the events organized and help us avoid having organizational problems. In addition, if we work with other colleagues on the same project, it can be very useful to have collaborative work software such as Trello that helps us to separate the tasks of each one and be fully organized.
On the other hand, we find an interesting, very intuitive solution that allows us to manage group tasks and projects, more than adequate for teleworking, Todoist. For this, it offers us a good number of integrated functions valid for both small and large groups. Its free version allows up to 80 simultaneous projects and five people per project. We also have paid versions with more features such as reminders, file sharing, etc. It should be noted that it integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar.