No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Tools for the Times: What Works When Working from Home: Page 4 of 4

Incredible Responses to a Black Swan Event
Most of the cloud video services I’ve discussed in this article have noted some degradation or outages as the world copes with COVID-19 and as these services manage unprecedented scalability demands. Nobody anticipated that significant portions of the knowledge and information worker populations in all the developed economies in the entire world would move to these (and other) cloud-based services.
 
Consequently, my position is that rather than expressing any disappointment in any of these services, we should rather be applauding them for providing as much capability and uptime as they have, particularly given the free service offers many of them provide. They have responded remarkably well to an incredibly disruptive black swan event, and we are all beneficiaries of their efforts.
 
Conclusion
You’ll get through working from home. You might even find you like it… a lot. There are exceptional communications and collaboration options available to you, your teams, and your social networks. Many of these have excellent free offerings. My take on the free offerings during the pandemic is that the Cisco Webex Meetings and Microsoft Teams offerings have the most continuing capacity followed by Lifesize. Of these, I find Webex Meetings and Lifesize easier to use than Microsoft Teams. Zoom is also easy to use, but without someone having a paid license, you can only get a maximum of three people or locations together.
 
Be assured that you can get work done from home during this pandemic. You can do sales calls, have team meetings, do interviews, provide training, and even provide cheer and goodwill to friends, family, and the sick and needy. To make working from home effective, you’ll need to adopt some personal practices and discipline, such as getting to “work” on time, keeping mentally and physically fit, and avoiding time-wasting activities, including raiding the refrigerator.
 
Make this time working from home one of the most enjoyable and effective periods of your life using the principles and tools I’ve outlined in this article. Plus find your own way of working that makes you successful. You can be productive, you can remain connected with people, and you can even use the commute time you save to do small fulfilling projects you never had the time to do before. Working from a home office can be extremely satisfying… as it has been to me for nearly two decades.