Coronavirus is a challenge for businesses, and remote work is a somewhat experiment for the majority of companies. Many of them wonder how to run a remote workflow, how to organise the employees, and which tools to use.

Each day, numerous small aspiring startups and international giants start working remotely. Yet, the home office is not equally pleasant and convenient for everyone.

And that’s not at all surprising - household chores, kids, or at least a temptation to watch TV or Netflix are those obstacles on the way to productive work.

But we’re in 4K Download offering a solution - our top advice on how to run an efficient workflow from your warm home office.

Tools to work from home

Trello

Remote work can’t do without self-organising. Without tools like Trello, it’s complicated to run your workflow smoothly and meet all the hot deadlines.

Trello is a project management tool which helps you organise your projects and tasks into boards.

In the form of a roadmap, you can see what needs to be done, what’s being worked on at the moment, who’s working on it, and the ongoing status. With Trello, you and your team can easily organise your work, control current tasks and estimate your productivity.

Asana

Asana is a convenient tool for project management. Within the tool, you can sort your projects by sections, set up teamwork, add relevant files, discuss your projects and tasks. Progress tracking is rather easy since you or your team can see who’s in charge of a particular task at the moment.

CakeHR

CakeHR is a tool you can use to mark the absence of some of your colleagues, their sick leave, annual leave, or a day off.

Employees can also set goals within the tool - either global goals for the upcoming six months or small tasks to do in a month.

Zoom

If you’ve never worked remotely, you may feel lonely due to the lack of communication with your team. This can cause decreased interaction and engagement into the workflow. This is why it’s vital to keep the whole team interacted with each other.

When the whole team is able to communicate as they used to, see each other’s activity, performance, and general progress, they will easily focus on their individual tasks. For this purpose, apps like Zoom are designed.

Zoom is one of the most popular video conferencing apps. Even the British Parliament uses the software to meet up during these difficult social distancing times.

This app allows screen sharing and cross-platform instant messaging. Free to download, you can invite up to 100 people in a video conference on this app. This app can serve you even if you want to discuss some non-business related topics with your colleagues or just to have a casual talk.

Slack

Slack is an instant messaging, remote office communication tool for teams and remote workers. It has great team management features for managing projects, assigning teams, planning launches, and openings, reviewing employee, sales contracts and more.

In Slack, you can also create channels to warm up your company atmosphere - announcements channel, a channel with memes and jokes, news channel, a channel with general communication and discussions.

Tools like Google services can be integrated into Slack, as well.

Toggle

One of the biggest fears businesses have when their employees work remotely is that the latter will not be as productive as they could be in office. If you’re convinced you need to track how much time your team spends on work, you can use special tools for this - time trackers.

Toggle is a simple time tracking tool. You can break down your hours by projects, clients and tasks to see what’s making you money - and what’s holding you back.

Combin Scheduler

Combin Scheduler is an easy-to-use tool for everyone who works with Instagram content - business owners, entrepreneurs, influencers, social media managers and regular users.

If during the coronavirus lockdown you can’t shoot new content for your personal or business Instagram page, you can publish your stockpiled photos and plan them within Combin Scheduler.

With this tool, you can schedule Instagram posts and Stories for auto-publishing, tag other Instagrammers, repost Instagram publications, add a link in bio when planning a post or a Story, edit images, tag locations, add and manage hashtags, and publish any Instagram content from your desktop whether it’d be Windows, macOS or Ubuntu.

Confluence

Confluence is a team workspace platform, which enables collaboration and transparency across diversified groups. You can store here any information required for your teamwork with an in-app knowledge base and keep reports, documents, instructions and alike there.

What to do after work at home?

You truly understand that you’ve worked well and the performance was productive if you feel that pleasant tiredness at the end of the business day. To cheer yourself up after a hard day, you need to know how to end your day properly.

Here are some things you can do to entertain yourself after work. Remotely, too.

Online cocktails and virtual dinners

You can start a cocktail hour on a video conferencing site like Zoom, Skype or the Houseparty app sending your friends an invitation to drink in front of their laptop or phone at a time when you might meet in a bar or at each other’s places.

Surprising is how different you will feel after you see your friends’ faces and hear them talk and laugh.

If you miss bars, you can visit an online bar like Brewdog or Stay the F*ck Home bar.

Museums, theatres and nightclubs

During the COVID-19 lockdown, many big museums and theatres still let visitors attend their exhibitions and performances. Online, of course.

The first worth visiting resource is Google Arts & Culture, the platform many of you haven’t even heard of. It features thousands of high-resolution images from more than 1,200 museums globally, including the National Gallery in London, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Google Arts & Culture is available for desktop, iOS and Android smartphones.

Many world-renowned museums have their own tours and digitalised galleries, including the Louvre, Vatican Museum , Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History , Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Fans of Broadway Shows can get a seven-day trial offered by BroadwayHD and watch world-renowned musicals and plays online.

Opera fans can watch free recorded performances on OperaVision. Teatro Reggio in Turin and Vienna State Opera also have their own free streams.

If conventional art is not your cup of tea, you can even go digital clubbing. Many night clubs like Watergate, Griessmuehle, Tresor, YAAM, and Zur Klappe stream live as part of United We Stream movement on YouTube. DJs like Diplo with his Coronight streams and Armin van Buuren are having live streams with dance and club music, too.

Digital fitness

Shuttered gyms are not an exception in this coronavirus lockdown. If you can’t live without sport, work out at home to stay fit. Luckily, YouTube has tons of workout and yoga videos and playlists you can download on your PC or Mac and train at home.

Use the 4K Video Downloader app to save workouts for offline use.

Work from home: a takeaway

After the quarantine, business owners will understand that business processes change and can be controlled remotely. All in all, work from home doesn’t mean employees will watch TV and hold a company back. There’s nothing to fear when it comes to a home office.

Employers and big bosses still can track the performance of their team, meet with them online, assign tasks and even track how many hours they spend working on the tasks and projects. Luckily, there are a plethora of tools for any of the goals.