Here are some of the tools we use to work remotely and how to successfully move from an office to a distributed team working from home.
Working from home to flatten the curve
With the gobal outbreak of Covid-19, also known as Coronavirus, we see that normal life becomes heavily impacted. These actions are necessary to ensure that the number of victims don’t outweigh the capacity of our healthcare institutes. This action by governments is now referred to as the Flatten The Curve approach.
The best way to slow down the spread of this virus is to keep people at home as much as possible. In Belgium, the government has taken action to prevent a critical outbreak: closing schools, restaurants, cultural and social locations and cancelling all public and private events.
Our Belgian government also demanded businesses to have their employees and contractors work from home (WFH) as much as possible.
Management, administration, public relations and most of IT can be done from wherever there’s an internet connection. And why not? Most of the office suites like Microsoft Office 365 or Google Suite are cloud based and offer a wide selection of tools you can use to be productive and are great for working from home.
Development tools
For developers life there are platforms like GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab where online collaboration is made possible by providing version control as a service.
Business operation tools
Project management, customer relation managment and enterprise resource planning can now also be provided as a service. Platforms like Basecamp, Atlassian Tools, Phabricator, Salesforce, Zoho One and HubSpot are some great examples of online business applications.
Communication tools
For communications there are so many options out there it’s impossible to list them all. We are fans of Slack and Zoom for online communications as they are easy to use and integrate with all the other services we use.
References for working from home
Our company is already works completely remote. The current situation doesn’t have much of an impact on us. But if you are a “new” remote worker we understand you have many, many questions.
Below you will find a list of some interesting articles about remote work, written by experienced organizations with remote teams:
- Your guide to work remotely in Slack by Slack
- Why great teams embrace remote work by Trello
- New ways for remote teams to work together by Microsoft
- Helping you work, teach and learn from anywhere by Google
- 40 Lessons From 4 Years of Remote Work by Buffer
- The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work by Zapier
- Challenges as a remote worker by Egeniq
- A Crash Course in Remote Management by WordPress
- Coronavirus and the Remote Work Experiment No One Asked For by Matt Mullenweg (founding developer of WordPress)
- How to make remote work, work by 1password
A final thought
Even though we should remain in self-isolation as much as possible, this period of isolation can be very challenging to people around you. Help others in your neighborhood where you can, even if it’s just getting an extra loaf of bread from the bakery.
