by Natasha Mahoney, Digital Manager
The business landscape looks different these days, with the majority of the UK’s office workers now working from home. Thankfully, advances in technology means this has been quite a seamless transition and many businesses are functioning as normal; just remotely.
After a few weeks of trial and error, we’ve had a look at some of the best tech on offer to help keep us connected, motivated and productive from our home offices.
Video Conferencing
This may be an obvious one, but it feels like face to face communication has never been so important. Video conferencing apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Skype have seen huge increases in downloads, and according to a report by App Annie, during a record-breaking week from March 15–21, weekly downloads for Zoom were 14 times higher in the U.S.; 20 times higher in the UK; 22 times higher in France; and a staggering 55 times higher in Italy than the weekly average in 2019.
Video conferencing (VC) is not just a key tool for productivity, during the lockdown that the UK is facing, access to VC software can make a huge difference to team morale. Allowing businesses to keep their teams close and communicating as normal wherever possible.
Productivity Apps
For those of us used to working in an office, we’ve replaced team tea rounds and spur of the moment brainstorms with makeshift workstations in the living room and juggling our workload with keeping children occupied.
Productivity apps have changed the game in recent years, with favourite Wunderlist now integrating with Slack and other platforms like Todoist to allow colleagues to create, update and share their work collaboratively. This should make it easier for managers to identify heavy workloads and help spread the load, while ensuring tasks don’t fall through the cracks.
Social Media & Scheduling
Social media has been integral to business communication for almost a decade, but there’s been a real shift in messaging in the last few weeks. So, now is an important time to review content and consider how well it is performing against your objectives.
A social scheduling tool like Hootsuite, Awario or Sprout Social offers many benefits to make social content work harder. From oversight capabilities to the ease of moving content if the news agenda changes and reviewing engagement analytics. Investing in a platform like this can remove much of the stress from social media.
Analytics
Finally, analytics and reporting cannot be underestimated when it comes to deciding strategic next steps. With well over 100 countries worldwide under varying degrees of lockdown, consumer behaviour has changed drastically in a way no experts have modelled or predicted.
Now is the time to analyse everything, from social media activity, to website traffic and customer feedback to help understand and effectively manage the new world coming toward us. Google Analytics and social engagement platforms will give the figures, but platforms like Hubspot can help businesses track and understand what they mean for them.
We’d love to know what digital platforms you’re using most just now?