Does productivity improve at home office or, on the contrary, do companies lose effectiveness? Home Office is an Anglo-Saxon concept that refers, nowadays, to telecommuting, to the home office. It is about this evolution, which technologies have fostered since the end of the 20th century, and which have exploded in recent months.
The current world crisis caused by Covid-19 has made it the reality of millions of people. Therefore, it is time to analyze this movement. But it is also time to check productivity in home office.
Perhaps the world has lost the rhythm of globalization. But during the quarantine it seems that he has made his digital transformation. If crises, be it wars or pandemics, earthquakes or nuclear accidents, accelerate all trends, that of the coronavirus has been no exception.
As a result, he has sent millions of people to work from home tracking software who have been able to fulfill their obligations thanks to the home office. The question is how to organize this work to guarantee productivity in home office. And this for both the company and the worker.
Table of Contents
Telework Vs Remote Work
To clarify the concept in a crystalline way, home office is the space that you allocate to work at home. Today, with the coronavirus crisis, it has become directly synonymous with telework . But it is a good idea to differentiate it from remote work.
Although they are both telecommuting, the first is the one that works from home. For its part, the second can simply be done from anywhere . In this way, it can be done in a cafeteria, in a hotel room or in a coworking room.
However, in both situations, checking productivity at home office is necessary for the development of any business.
Home office goes beyond technology
The concept of telework is born because, on a technical level, any task carried out at the workplace in the company or administration through a computer can be exported to the worker’s home. The cloud computing , group work tools, organization of work or video conferencing make it possible.
But productivity in home office goes beyond using technological platforms. Another important concept that complements it is trust. There are many companies that are not comfortable with this fundamental aspect of digital transformation. This has meant that for a long time it has been ruled out that the staff could telework.
Still, the coronavirus crisis is accelerating the entire process. And, therefore, facilitating it. All this obviously affects productivity at home office. But keep in mind that without teleworking, productivity in these two months would have been negative.
For example, during these weeks it has been seen that powerful companies like Microsoft and Google have put free of charge multiple communication tools that enable teleworking: Teams and Hangouts Meet, respectively. Platforms that help increase productivity in home office.
7 apps to monitor productivity in home office
One aspect that needs to be studied is the productivity in home office that these tools allow. And something similar can be said of the so in vogue instant messaging, probably the star option today for communication between workers and their responsible managers.
Therefore, an infallible guide to apps and web services to monitor productivity in the home office must include names such as Kenjo, Factorial, Whatsapp, Slack, the Google Suite or Zoom.
1.Kenjo
Implement telework and manage teams remotely. with certain airs of Japanese innovative self-sufficiency, explains on its website that its tool offers everything that your company needs to manage employees remotely .
As examples, it stands out that it offers a remote time control that allows you to see what time each employee connects to work, when they take their break or the number of hours worked. It also allows managing absences. Thus, managers will be able to know who is absent due to vacations, illness, maternity leave or a visit to the doctor.
2.Factorial
It is a job evaluation software to face the challenges of telework. Its objective is to organize the evaluation of the work of your employees to gain visibility of the state of your company. So you can make decisions based on qualitative data. The direct consequence is that the increase in productivity in the home office is clearly measured.
Among the advantages and facilities offered by Factorial is the possibility of implementing your own model or using one of the ones they provide. Also the evaluations are fully customizable. Factorial allows you to configure the criteria and who will be evaluated in the company.
The platform then sends automatic notifications to all workers, and participants fill out their evaluations directly on the platform.
3.Giitic
It is an employee monitoring and control software to know the times worked and analyze productivity in the home office. This tool ensures that teleworkers actually go to work and not to other activities.
With this, you can take advantage of teleworking, reduce costs and, at the same time, increase productivity in the home office. For example, the system keeps track of programs used and sites visited, so you can tell if the teleworker was actually performing activities that had to do with their daily work.
4. Whatsapp
It is the star of instant messaging. It has been, in most cases, the first tool to be used to organize teleworking. One of its greatest potential is that WhatsApp makes it easy for teams to quickly communicate with each other in groups of up to 256 people.
Other advantages offered by this service are WhatsApp Web or Desktop, so that it integrates definitively into the working environment of the teleworker.
Chats on WhatsApp are protected by end-to-end encryption, which means that only you and the recipient can see what is being sent, neither WhatsApp nor anyone else. That makes it a safe place to share confidential documents that would be destroyed by the shredder once read in the office.
5.Google Suite to organize yourself during teleworking
Google Suite groups a multitude of tools from the Google environment aimed at a professional audience. These include:
Google Calendar . It provides the possibility of changing the color of the tasks in the calendar itself so that the organization plan and objectives are known at a glance.
Google Docs . Lets you share a file from Google Docs and the Google Suite. The interesting thing is that it can be edited synchronously by several users.
Google Meet . It is the tool for video conferencing. One of its advantages is security. Meet video conferences are encrypted in transit and your meetings are protected by various anti-abuse measures. Also, these options are enabled by default. Meet makes it easy to join video calls from work. To do this, you simply have to set up a meeting and share the link.
6.Zoom
Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing service that can be used to meet with virtually others, be it video, audio, or both . All this while you do live chats. It also allows you to record sessions for later viewing.
Unlimited individual meetings can be held even with the free plan. In addition, you have the option of group webinars from 100 participants.
During the coronavirus pandemic , the season in which up to 300 million people have come to use the platform, Zoom has succeeded throughout April 2020. It has gone from having 10 million active users in 2019 to more than 300 million, at the end of April.
Before the coronavirus spread , the company’s shares were worth $ 70. Last March 23 they were worth $ 160, that is, a total capitalization of more than $ 44 billion. A good example of one of the winning tools during confinement.
7.Slack
It is a web tool that allows you to work in channels, thus offering all members of your team a shared vision of progress and a clear purpose.
Slack brings the team together, wherever you are, ” with all your communication and tools in one place, ” they say from the platform. In this way, teams working remotely can maintain productivity in the home office no matter where they work from.
The key to Slack is that conversations are organized. So instead of having a single overflowing inbox, conversations in Slack take place in exclusive spaces called channels .
These are just 7 of the apps with which you can monitor productivity in home office. They are essential tools for all the departments of a company, including sales, one of the fundamentals in the current economic situation.
