The Singapore government recently announced a partial lock down to help control the spread of COVID-19.  Remote working or Working from home is now a new norm.  This article will provide guidance on how to successfully work from home as well as how to manage your team effectively remotely.

Communication is Key For Successful Remote Working

Employees within the company can no longer engage each other with face-to-face meetings.  This will have a significant impact on productivities due to:

• unclear work priorities which may change more drastically during this lock down period
• unable to make and obtain decisions in an the most efficient way, especially when a discussion between a few stakeholders is required to make the final decision
• difficulty in effectively communicating your thoughts when previously this could be done in a workshop or brainstorm session with everyone present in the room.

These are only a few of the many challenges that you and your team may be facing. Therefore, it is so essential to select communication tools that will help you and your team overcome the above obstacles.

Some of the features that you should be looking out for are:

• Ability to allow your team to collaborate in the delivery of tasks. This could range from the ability to have multiple employees on a conference call, multiple screen shares, allowing multiple users to take control of the screen etc.
• Group and individual instant-chat capability – ability to create group chats will help streamline communication. You can group by business functions i.e. sales, marketing, operations or even by team or topic.
• Security – ensure the chosen app complies with your company’s security policies.
• User management – ability to add, remove and manage each user level access easily
• Audit/Tracing – Ensure chat history is recorded for auditability purposes. It can also be extremely helpful for your team to be able to search chat history to retrace or recall information.
• Integration – You may want to integrate your chat tool with your other operational activities or apps to streamline some of the existing processes.

Some recommended tools are Slack, Skype or Zoom.

Collaborative Tools to Help You Work Together Remotely

Technology has made collaborating between remote team members possible.  From storing and sharing information, coding or executing a design project for a group of two or more.  Below are some recommended online tools.

• If you need to store your data on the cloud that is safe and secure, the leading players are – GoogleDrive and DropBox. Your team will be able to access files from anywhere easily and securely.  They also have version control functionality to support audit requirements as well as the ability to revert your file back to any previous versions if required.
• For the building of presentations, brochures or any marketing material, Canva allows multiple users to contribute to and complete the project together.
• GitHub is an opensource application that allows multiple coders to manage source codes in an effective manner.

Online Project Management and Task Tracking 

Remote working will not be possible if you are unable to track and mange to assigned tasks and activities.  If you are looking into ways to help you manage and track your own tasks or your team’s tasks online to help increase transparency and visibility, a Task Tracking or Project Management tool will help you do just that.  For example:

• Sales and marketing activities that needs to be carried out against a timeline.
• Ability for your support team to log issues that needs to be resolved.
• Builds and bugs for your developers to attend to with differing priorities.
• Management team to track risks and actions to be carried out.

With teams in separate locations adhering to social-distancing, this can help promote transparency within the team and enable every team member to manage work in a more seamless and efficient manner.

Some recommended tools are Trello and PivotalTracker.