6 Technologies Your Business Needs To Support Work From Home

Working from home is increasingly becoming the norm. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, many organizations were increasingly offering remote work as an option to employees. If you want to permanently support working from home, you will need some technologies to help your team. With these upgrades, you could even switch to entirely remote operation.

1) Video Conferencing

Face time is one of the main challenges of working from home. Simply put, people miss seeing each other face-to-face. Furthermore, seeing each other while talking helps improve communication. Fortunately, you can resolve this with a good video-conferencing application.

By setting people up to video chat with each other easily, you can help them have clearer and more timely interactions. This is a must-have for any team that is trying to keep communication flowing while working remotely.

2) Real-Time Chat

Another must-have item for remote communication is a real-time chat application. People could use email for their asynchronous messaging, but that can be frustrating a slow. Instant messaging is often a far better option. Depending on the tool you choose, you can set up group chats based on topics and teams. Team members can also quickly direct chat with each other whenever they need to talk.

You can also share files and initiate calls in many popular chat applications. These tools help keep the wheels turning for modern organizations. Find the option that is right for your needs.

3) Payroll Management

Working remotely doesn’t just affect communication. You also need to keep your various operations running smoothly. For example, keeping your payroll in order can be more of a challenge. While direct deposit and online time tracking can help make working from home simpler, you will also need to give people online pay stub access.

Fortunately, the solutions for managing payroll operations online are easy to use. However, these are the small details you need to think of when offering work from home as a permanent option.

4) Project Management

Keeping your team organized is easier with the right project management tools. These help you stay on track and ensure that everyone is working towards consistent goals. Good project management practices are valuable in every organization. However, they are especially important for remote teams.

It can be easy to get on different pages when working in separate locations. Fortunately, some tools make it very simple to share and organize tasks and goals. More important than the tool, however, is that you implement consistent and effective processes that work for your team’s unique needs.

5) VPN

Data security is at a premium for remote teams. They need to be able to access data and applications easily from anywhere. However, if your IT resources can be accessed by anyone and without encryption, they will be significantly less secure.

One of the simple solutions is to implement a virtual private network. This will help your people to access all your digital resources from home, while traveling or from any other network. It will also ensure that your business remains safe on the internet.

6) Data Backup

Defending your data from hackers isn’t the only way you need to protect it. People make mistakes, data get corrupted and things get lost. It is essential to have backups of all your data. You may achieve this with a cloud-based file-sharing system. You could also give everyone access to an on-premise server that is then backed up regularly.

Planning a backup system that expects people to make mistakes is a good idea. The more foolproof your system, the better off you will be. It all starts with assuming that files and data will be accidentally deleted or lost.

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Implementing a work-from-home system can help your business to be more resistant to interruption. Better yet, you can potentially save significantly by operating entirely virtually. The above tools are some of the keys to making the most of working from home.