The last few years saw a lot of industries embrace the internet as their alternative workspace. During the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every organization except those in health care had to create an arrangement that allowed workers to work outside of their traditional office environment which has also contributed to the expansion of the remote job industry. Before now, workers had to converge at a central location to get work done but the evolution of technology has made work easier. Workers are no longer bound by the walls of their office as they can now complete their assignments from anywhere provided they have the right tools needed to work remotely.
However, if you’re a remote worker or you’re seeking to delve into the remote industry, these are tools that you must have.
- A Desktop, Laptop, or Smartphone: How exactly do you work if you don’t have any of these? For work from home to be achievable, you have to have either a personal computer, a laptop, a smartphone, or a tablet. All these are essential for your initial home office setup. Depending on what your job needs, some occupations only require that you have a smartphone and you’re good to go. Be sure of what your job wants. For example, if your organization wants to track your work rate while working from home, you might want to get a desktop.
- Reliable Internet Access: What is an online job without a reliable Internet connection? Before delving into freelance or remote work, you have to understand that you can not accomplish much without a reliable Internet connection. There are pocket-size wifi routers that you can easily pick up from stores. If you don’t want to do that, you can always use your phone for wifi, you can get a sim only deal that will provide you with the internet you need. Connect your phone to your laptop and you’re ready to go.
- Online Office Suite: While working remotely, you have to communicate with your team via file sharing. When an assignment is completed you have to share the file with your superior one way or another. To do this, you’d be needing software that allows you to share files uninterruptedly. A very popular file-sharing software is Microsoft Office online. It allows you to share all kinds of files, it also eases your file sharing process.
- Team Chat Applications: If you’re working remotely with a team, you will be needing a medium of communication between you and your team. You don’t have to always call the manager to know whether there’s a new assignment. However, different applications work for this purpose eg, Microsoft Teams, Google Chats, Discord, etc. You can select the one that works best for you.
- Video Conferencing Applications: Video calls give a feeling of connection with other teammates. This is a very important tool to have because of video conferences or meetings that could come up at any point in time. Your employer might also feel the need to place a video call to you to know what you’re up to, so you want to have this in your toolkit. You should consider apps like Zoom or Google Meet to do your video meeting.
- Flash Drive or Cloud Storage App: You want to make sure that you do not lose any important files, so you have to have a flash drive or cloud storage app. The cloud storage application will help you access files from any device as long as the file is saved in the cloud drive. An example is Google Drive.
- Note-taking Apps or Pad: You might think is not important, but the importance of a journal for note-taking cannot be overemphasized. Just in case you have to put down the link to an important website or there’s a topic you have to look up it is necessary to have note-taking apps. This enables you to put down important information that you do not want to forget.
- Cables or Extra Chargers: Some circumstances can not be predicted and one of them is your charger getting fried because of an unstable electrical voltage. For that not to affect your workflow, you should plan and get an extra cable charger and you’re good to go.
Working from home has a lot of advantages, it helps reduce the stress of having to go to work every day. It also helps you save. It is, however, important to have the right tools to enable you to have a good work-from-home experience.
