Tips to make your colleagues work from home more efficiently.

As an IT professional, how can you ensure that your colleagues can work from home as efficiently and productively as possible? Hans van der Linden, Business Development Manager at Pro Warehouse, explains how he envisions the ideal workplace at home.

Ensure the correct hardware.

Now that we work from home almost full-time, we expect more from our workplace. A good desk and an ergonomic chair are, of course, a must. I cannot deny that good posture is particularly important, but a pleasant home workplace consists of more than that.

Employees often receive a company laptop. This, of course, ensures you can work any place and any time. Yet a properly functioning laptop is not enough. Consider, for example, an extra keyboard and mouse, an external display and a dock for easy connection of a laptop and all peripherals. Incidentally, your working posture also improves while using these accessories.

Accessories for working from home pleasantly.

When working from home, naturally work and private life become intertwined. Yet, it is important to be able to close off from one or the other properly when necessary. Accessories that make working from home more pleasant are, for example, AirPods Pro with noise cancelling functionality. These filter out distracting noises. Also very useful during meetings.

An Apple Pencil can also help you immensely when working from home. Not everyone has a printer, and printing, writing, scanning and emailing something is also quite time-consuming. With an iPad and Apple Pencil, you can easily make notes or check documents. It is also possible to completely work on an iPad, which I like to do myself.

Software can make a big difference.

The right hardware, in combination with good software, makes working from home easy, enjoyable and productive. The most common complaint about working from home is losing contact with colleagues. However, there are several ways to keep in touch and collaborate effectively. Even when you cannot see each other in person.

Slack

With Slack, you can easily stay in contact with your colleagues. It is a business chat program, where you can have group and private conversations without any problems. This is ideal for asking short questions, as chatting feels less formal than emailing. A big advantage of Slack is that you have to email each other a lot less. The platform works on almost all devices and ensures that you can be productive anytime and anywhere. You can also make notes on the screen during a video call. This way, everybody will be able to see what you are pointing at.

More about Cloud Apps.

Microsoft Teams is an online collaboration tool from Microsoft that is included in a number of Microsoft 365 licenses. It is ideal for when employees, now spread across different locations, need to work together. You can easily add a Teams meeting to an Outlook invitation, and there is a central database for all files. You can simultaneously work with colleagues on, for example, an Excel sheet or Word document. Changes are saved automatically, and you can see what your colleague changes in real time. This way, you really work together remotely.