The unfortunate COVID19 crisis, which started from China, has now spread all over the world, already taken thousands of lives and brought the world to a standstill. Since the last 3-4 weeks we are under various levels of lockdowns and curfews depending on situations in different countries and cities. Overnight, along with our social lives, the way we work has also drastically changed. Many people have lost their jobs, many will lose in the coming days. We are fortunate enough to be able to work from home and saving our employment. We should be thankful to health and sanitation workers, security forces and all government and private sector workers who are working under life threatening conditions and keeping us safe.
COVID-19 is not the first crisis we are facing and it won’t be the last. Businesses are trying very hard to keep up their operations by making good use of technology. Strange that it took a global pandemic to force even technology companies to adopt digital transformation but the ease with which these companies and their employees transitioned to this new work culture is amazing. Millions of people are working remotely to keep businesses online without any substantial drop in productivity or quality of services. We talked to many people about their experiences. Here are some of the results they have observed:
1- Most people said that working remotely has resulted in increased work productivity and that now they are able to concentrate more on work.
2- Most of them are working 1-3 hours more than usual, but since they don’t have to travel, work days don’t feel hectic anymore. It would have been a much better experience for them if there wasn’t a lockdown or a health crisis.
3- The money they earlier used to spend on traveling and other expenses are now adding up to their savings. And they get more time for health and fitness activities. Though gyms are closed, meditation and basic workout at home really helps. Some said that they are focussing on their personal financial planning.
4- People are learning new skills from platforms like Udemy, Udacity and others and they hope these skills will help them advance in their careers. Major skills being AI, ML, Fullstack Web Development, Entrepreneurship. Some are spending time improving their coding skills on HackerEarth, HackerRank and CodeChef. Apart from career related skills, people are showing interest in cooking, Yoga and dance related content.
5- Though most of them have positive experiences so far, few reported drop in productivity due to power cuts and internet and system issues. They said they would have performed better if they had better machines and reliable internet connection and power supply.
6- Staying indoors for such a long period of time is disturbing for many but some are optimistic about this workstyle once the world normalizes after this pandemic is over.
Popular tools that people are using while working Remotely:
1- Zoom– Zoom is a San Jose, California based company which provides videotelephony and online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform. Zoom has become very popular for group video conferencing. With all this popularity, there are growing concerns about privacy after reports of “Zoom-bombing”, where hackers or trolls hijacked public video calls on Zoom. Also it was revealed that Zoom video conference calls were being routed through servers in china.
2- Skype, Webex , BlueJeans , GoToMeeting and Google Hangouts
3- Trello – Trello is a collaborative Task management Tool that can help you to assign, track and organize tasks and projects.
Asana is another project management tool that you can use to ensure timely completion of various tasks and projects and montior your team’s performance.
4- Google Suite – Google suite offers various collaboration tools like Docs, Sheets, Google drive and many others to help your team share files, collaborate on projects.
5- Slack
6- Zeplin , Figma , Marvel , Avocode
7- Workplace
8- Teams
9- GitHub , Bitbucket
Do you find Work From Home productive or are you facing issues in this transition? Share your experiences at hello@oyeamiko.com. Also check out OyeAmiko which we are developing as a community of Entrepreneurs, travelers and nomads like you.
