Effective Work from Home Guide for Startups and Small Businesses
Humanity is going through one of the worst crises of recent times. Shops are closed, people are locked within their homes, flights are canceled, Businesses are filing for bankruptcy, Hospitals are flooded with patients. COVID-19 (Coronavirus) has created a huge trouble for all.
One of the segments which is most impacted by COVID-19 (Coronavirus) is that of young startups and small businesses. Most businesses have asked all of their employees to work from home. For quite a few businesses, the work from home exercise is proving out to be extremely difficult. Reason? They haven’t done it in the past and so, they are not equipped with the right tools that can help them at this time.
In this blog post, I will talk about some free and simple tools that you can use to ensure employee productivity as they work from home.
First and foremost: daily communication. How do you communicate with your employees on a day-to-day basis? For a small startup with < 10 employees, calls are one of the best mechanisms. The moment your team size grows beyond 10, calls are not really possible. Email is another effective way. However, emails are not really “real-time”. Therefore, here are some suggested tools for real-time communication:
WhatsApp is the most obvious and one of the most effective tools for real-time communication. You can create a WhatsApp group for all your team members or individual sub-teams within your startup. WhatsApp is free for all.
Slack
Slack is one of the most popular messaging platforms these days. Slack has a concept of “channels” wherein you can create groups for various teams. For instance, you can have a separate group for the Tech/Product team as against the Operations team or Sales team. Slack has a simple Web and a Mobile App (Android as well as iOS). Slack is free for small businesses up to a certain limit.
Google Hangouts Chat
For Businesses who use GSuite, Google Hangouts Chat is a much easier option as compared to Slack. Reason? Your employees can keep using Hangouts Chat with their Business email address. GSuite is obviously not free. However, GSuite comes with a bunch of features — email, documents, presentations, excel, email, chat, video call, forms, todo lists, translate and forms. Like Slack, it comes with a Web and Mobile App which is simple and intuitive to use. You won’t have to spend time teaching your employees. We at AllinCall use Google Hangouts Chat.
There are some other tools like Zoho, but the above are certainly better from the usability perspective.
The next important aspect of communication with your employees is daily meetings. There are some well-known tools for meetings over a Video Call and you should definitely use them in your business.
Google Hangouts
We use Google Hangouts a lot and it is certainly one of the best meeting tools. Google Hangouts comes with built-in screen-sharing capabilities which helps you share your screen with your colleagues (for example, when you want to show them some document). We at AllinCall use Google Hangouts for conducting interviews as well. The beauty of Google Hangouts is that it seamlessly integrates with Google Calendar which is an essential tool for scheduling meetings. Hangouts and Calendar are both free on your Gmail ID. If you want them to work on your Business account, you will have to purchase GSuite.
Zoom
Zoom.us is another great tool for meetings. Zoom is also free up to a certain limit. Zoom is quite similar to Google Hangouts and contains Video-conferencing facilities as well. An important differentiation of Zoom with Google Hangouts is that Zoom has positioned itself as a Business Communication Software and so, many Enterprises also use Zoom. Google Hangouts is blocked by most large organizations. So, if you are service enterprise clients, you may want to stick with Zoom for client-facing meetings.
Next comes the most essential tools we use — MS Excel, MS Powerpoint and MS Word. The problem with these tools is that sharing and collaboration are very difficult. If you want to work with a colleague over a presentation, you will have to struggle with back and forth emails, maintaining multiple versions of the presentation. It leads to a huge waste of time.
To solve this problem, there are several excellent tools in the market that will help you and your colleagues work together on a single document in real-time.
Google Docs, Slides and Sheets
Google has made available 3 excellent and free tools — Google Docs, Slides and Sheets. All 3 tools are brilliant for real-time collaboration. As the name suggests, Docs is for Documents, Slides is for Presentations and Sheets is for Excel. All 3 of them come as a part of the GSuite bundle as well.
Office 365
Microsoft Office 365 is another well-known tool for using MS Excel, Powerpoint and Word online. The beauty is that Microsoft offers some 1000 GB of storage per employee as against GSuite which offers just 30 GB per employee at a similar price. If you love the Google ecosystem, you may want to stick with GSuite. However, if you are used to MS Word, Powerpoint and Excel, you may want to try out Office 365 as an amazing alternative.
The last important leg is the collaboration tool for file storage. You may have files stored on your laptop which you would want to share with your colleagues. Email is the most natural way to do so. However, email faces the big problem of maintaining file versions and a lack of real-time collaboration facility. To solve this problem, you can use cloud-based file storage systems like Google Drive and Dropbox.
Google Drive
Google Drive is simple and one of the most intuitive cloud-based file management systems. You can create files and store them on the cloud. Your colleagues can edit them in real-time. The best part is that Google provides a top-class security wherein, you have full control over who has access to your files. You can restrict access at an email level, or you can make the file accessible to a group of people. Further, you can restrict the type of access — who can edit the file, who can only see the file, who can comment on the file, etc.
Dropbox
Dropbox is another excellent file-sharing tool that is quite popular. Like Google Drive, Dropbox also offers the option to restrict/control the access to the file.
Some other important points that you should note.
Create a Team Structure
While so far, you would have been directly managing your 18 employees, it would become a bit difficult now. Communicating with 18 people remotely would be tough and so, it is a good time to build a team structure. For instance, identify the 4 people who work on similar things and then find out who among them is the best. Make him/her the manager of the other 3. Now, it is the job of this person to ensure the output of the other 3. This way, you can communicate with this single manager rather than 4 people.
Ensure that you have a good Internet Connection
It is extremely important that all your team members have a decent internet connection. A simple 10 Mbps connection with some 2 GB of data limit per day should suffice for most businesses unless you are in video-intensive businesses.
Communication is the key
At this difficult time, make sure that you stay close to your team. You should keep communicating with your team members periodically to ensure that the team spirit is maintained.
Create a separate COVID-19 (Coronavirus) leave policy
To help your employees who are in trouble, ensure that you set up a separate COVID-19 (Coronavirus) leave policy wherein you are offering them some 4–8 days of additional leave for unforeseen circumstances. Remember, while the pandemic is temporary, your team will stay for long with you. A bit of help from your side now will make sure that your team is loyal.
Also, at this time, you should make sure that you help your employees in staying aware of the measures to stay safe from COVID-19 (Coronavirus). You may want to check our Coronavirus awareness ChatBot for the same: https://fightcorona.allincall.in/
Stay healthy and stay safe!
