Unless your job is considered “essential,” you’ve been parked at home throughout the pandemic. You’re not alone, as approximately 29 percent of the U.S. workforce have jobs that allow them to work from home. And recently, this means home life and work life are coexisting in new ways.
Many entrepreneurs are finding working from home to be quite stressful. Luckily, there are a few technologies that exist just to help make the experience of working from home a lot easier.
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In fact, here are five of the best remote workplace technologies that will help improve the survival rate of startups during the COVID-19 pandemic:
Virtual meetings
When you need to video chat with your clients or staff, basic video meeting apps are the standard choice (such as the wildly popular Zoom), but there are other options, as well. Rather than having your living room as the background, remote networking platforms like SuperViz can render a 360-degree VR office video meeting environment.
You can also create a very life-like virtual environment that can be altered by overlaying images, videos, notes, audio clips, website links, or changing entire floor plans. It’s free and runs solely via your web browser, so there is no software that needs to be downloaded first.
Online identity verification
When you can talk with your employees at the office, it’s obviously easy to confirm their identity face-to-face. However, this is not nearly as easy when talking online. As such, you need a way to confirm the identity of the person you are talking to in order to ensure your startup is secure.
This is made easy by using online identity verification platforms, such as Ipsidy. This service uses a login portal to request that each person in the call use his or her mobile device to take a selfie, as well as take a picture of their government ID to confirm their identity.
Related: 3 Ways to Boost Your Team’s Work From Home Performance
Remote document signing
When files can’t be handed off in person, it makes getting them signed in a timely manner more difficult. Luckily, the WPESign WordPress online contract plugin makes this a lot easier.
Using this handy plugin, you can effortlessly build a contract, electronically sign the documents with a UETA and ESIGN compliant program, store an unlimited number of files, receive carbon copy receipts, protect files with two-factor verification, and so much more. This is a very user-friendly program that will remove any insufficiencies you may be experiencing when it comes to documents.
Employee management tools
As always, the happiness of your team is crucial to the success of your business. With your team now working from home, their satisfaction levels may have declined. The sooner that you know this, the sooner that you can plan some possible solutions. But getting accurate feedback from your team when they can’t be asked in person can be tough. This is where the Glint employee pulse surveys come in handy.
The program sends out surveys to remote workers on a frequent basis, then looks at the responses and creates engagement dashboards filled with analytics.These reports show you, as the company leader, the answers given and highlights any problem areas your team may be experiencing. This lets you know how your remote employees are doing at any given time, and how you can restructure any of your current workflow.
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Real-time communication apps
When your team is physically in the same space, quick communication just requires walking over to someone’s desk. But when your staff is at home, this suddenly changes. All these small, easy questions are no longer so simple to get answers to. A much more helpful method for you and your team is to embrace a real-time communication app like Slack.
You can create an account for your team, then even create smaller group chats with certain members of your team. This is a great way to improve your communications without overbearing your employees in countless emails.
If you are one of the many entrepreneurs who are still running your businesses remotely, then you’re likely going to need some help coping. By using these five technologies in your daily work routine, it will help to make running your business from home much more productive during this pandemic.
