Awards season, like most things, has been pretty much cancelled this year, but we couldn’t let the year pass without paying homage to some of the best technological tools that have seen us through one of the most challenging working years of our lives. They’ve kept work on track, allowed us to speak face-to-face from the home office, to collaborate with each other and our wider teams and to keep the world spinning when it effectively stood still for months. It’s only thanks to technology that working from home (WFH) has been possible.
Synextra’s top five awards for WFH tools in 2020:
Best Project Management Tool 2020: Trello.
When lockdown happened, we found ourselves sat three villages away from our closest colleagues almost overnight. Shouting ‘where are we up to with the product launch?’ over the office partition was no longer possible. You may already have been using a project management tool to keep up to date with every stage of the planning and execution – especially if you’re part of a much bigger inter-departmental team, but once annexed from a physical office, these tools became mandatory to stay on top of the overall task at hand. They track the project in real-time and the part that everyone is playing in that road map to success – keeping everyone in the loop. Tasks are assigned and easy to see in the bigger overall picture.
Senextra’s winner for best Project Management tool is Trello.
Best Communications Tool 2020: Zoom
This is probably the worthiest category of all. Had we even heard of Zoom in January of this year? Perhaps we had, but 2020 has put the brand on the map and delivered a meteoric rise to fame. Speaking face-to-face virtually has been the mainstay of home working to the point where it’s easy to see how in the future we may decide not to jump on that train to London – and instead save time, cost, effort and the environment on a Zoom call. It’s made video conferencing a first choice where it used to be the poor relation.
The ability to record the audio and video also delivers a much easier way of ‘note-taking’ during meetings, and the possibility of sharing the audio and video with other team members who couldn’t join the meeting. That’s difficult to do when you meet physically – so it provides benefits over and above getting together.
Our winner for best Communications tool – Zoom.
Best Collaboration Tool 2020: Microsoft Teams
This is a hard-fought category between Google Drive and Microsoft Teams – both have a wide ecosystem offering users a way to communicate and collaborate. Microsoft has the edge – it combines workplace chat, video meetings, file storage and application integration and it all integrates together with the Office365 suite of applications too as well as extending beyond to non-Microsoft product integration. The possibilities for collaboration are endless.
Best Collaboration tool for Synextra – MS Teams.
Best Productivity App 2020: Doodle
It can be like platting fog trying to get everyone on the same page at the same time. Sometimes it’s just easier to take a digital poll to see what suits everyone and when. It really shouldn’t take 50 emails to schedule a quick meeting. Doodle makes it much, much easier.
Doodle is the winner for us.
Best Team Messaging Tool 2020: Slack
Talking of reducing emails – Slack is by far our favourite way to communicate whilst reducing the number of internal emails being sent between teams. The persistent chat rooms organised by topic, the private groups and the direct messaging all help in reducing the inbox whilst keeping teams communicating.
Our favourite Messaging tool – Slack.
Life is easier Working from Home in 2020
With these five Working From Home Tools, life has been a lot easier, and we’re sure that the overnight growth in homeworking means they’re here to stay for the long term regardless of where we physically base ourselves.
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