Your FairlawnGig fiber connection affords you a very precious resource: bandwidth. Increasingly, you’ll see stories about how the “Internet is slow” as well as observe unstable television reporters’ conferencing connections from home. Thankfully, FairlawnGig’s Internet connections give Fairlawn an edge in our new work-from-home (WFH) reality.

With Governor Dewine’s stay-at-home order this weekend, many start to question what the best applications and technology are to simplify working from home. We’re neither an authority on every software and application available nor are we able to endorse technologies, but today we wanted to share what we’ve seen working for others as well as our own team.

Meetings
While conferencing stalwarts like GoTo Meeting and Webex are good solutions, Zoom is rapidly becoming the leading choice for virtual meetings. Zoom has been a reliable solution with fewer outages than other providers as well as lower latency. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom has lifted its 40-minute call limit for free accounts, which will allow schools (and you) to use Zoom for free.

Collaboration
Your organization may already use applications in the cloud like Office 365 or G Suite. These two tech giants also offer the business tools Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts. If you’re looking for an “instant messaging” platform for daily messaging and chatting amongst team member, the free version of Slack works great. Slack also enables file transfer over the app. The only downside to the free version is there is a limit on how many of your messages are archived.

Team and Project Management
To keep your team and projects organized, there’s no shortage of virtual tools. Trello and Asana are both established leaders in managing to-do’s, tasks, and projects amongst small or large groups. Work on a project with your team on either using task lists and message boards as well timeline and task deadlines. Asana and Trello can feel complex, so you could also try longtime marketing team collaboration favorite Basecamp as it offers a message board, chat room, and organized file storage.

Document Storage/Management
Both Quip and Google (G Suite) are good solutions which enable calendars, spreadsheets, word documents, and share them with colleagues. Another great storage solution is longtime cloud storage provider Dropbox.

Time Management
Looking for a way to track your and/or your team’s time while working remotely? Time Doctor is a time-tracking app that can help with focus and manage deadline. Hours and Toggl are other apps to manage time.

As far as other tips, we’d point you to advice via a webinar from longtime work-from-home company and Northeast Ohio HR consultant, Willory. The webinar from last week is available via replay and details how to successfully work from home and manage employees remotely.

We want to reiterate that the FairlawnGig team is working from home and ready to serve you with any of your needs or questions. Stay safe!