The Connected WFH Toolkit

The trend toward work from home (WFH) cultures has been steadily increasing over the past decade. With technological advances, the ability to be effective remotely has led to 16% of all registered companies exclusively hiring remote work and has seen a 140% increase in remote workers from the beginning of the 2010s. 

Now at the beginning of 2020, this trend has been accelerated as COVID-19 forces widespread social distancing and office shutdowns. For us at Connected, who are still committed to building better products for our clients, we feel our experience working across multiple offices—both with clients and across our multidisciplinary project teams—has equipped us with the knowledge needed to help set up an effective WFH model.

In the coming weeks, we will regularly create content that showcases our WFH model and gives you—our community, our partners, and our readers—the basics for being impactful from afar. To start off, we have focussed on the technological WFH toolkit that we use for effective product building.

Laptop

One of the two most critical tools in any digital worker’s pack is their laptop. It’s the necessary hardware that powers all of the software products that make WFH an enjoyable reality.

Wifi

The other-non negotiable tool for remote work. We advise that a remote workers wifi is a minimum of 10Mbps.

Google Hangouts

For internal meetings, we use the video conferencing tool available through Hangouts. In our experience, video conferencing makes the virtual meetings altogether more collaborative and personal, feeding both the quality of the work and the authenticity of the interaction.

Zoom

For external meetings, large-scale internal meetings, and pair programming we use Zoom. Zoom’s screen-sharing, remote control of others’ screens, and whiteboard capabilities make it an excellent option for project team collaboration. By adding a Zoom link to an invite, our practitioners make it clear that the upcoming meeting will be interactive and often require them to prepare either materials or ideas.

Slack

Slack is like an old friend to Connectors. It’s the ubiquitous communication tool for company-wide updates, project team daily chats, quick calls, social messaging, and channels set up around shared interests. It’s our most-used tool and when we’re working remotely it’s the best way to stay truly connected with the people you work with everyday—even if it’s just to hear about how their day is going.

Gmail

Emails are reserved almost exclusively for clients and for formal office notices—e.g. office closures, holiday parties, leadership announcements, etc. This helps ensure that people don’t feel the need to check their emails all day long, and can instead focus on heads-down, impactful work.

Google Drive

If Connectors are unsure on where to find something, it’s almost certainly on the Drive. For project teams who are working off of critical documents remotely, the Drive saves time and reduces the cognitive load of having to wonder where to find what you need.

Lattice

Lattice is our much-used feedback, goal-setting, professional development, and manager one-on-one tool. Remote work can easily feel directionless and lonely, as there can be a feeling of having to go it alone. This tool helps Connectors guide each other’s work, celebrate each other’s successes, and keep teams together no matter where they are.

Asana

Who doesn’t enjoy celebrating a job well done with a unicorn flying across their screen? It’s one of the small, delightful features (when you tick that a task is complete) that makes Asana an integral and well-loved tool at Connected. The ability to manage tasks by assigning deadlines and individuals to a task gives people a sense of direction and accountability that can often evade them when working remotely. Asana keeps working dynamics alive through a clear interface that makes everyone’s responsibilities clear.

Access to client-specific tools

All of the other tools in this list (except home wifi) are provided to Connectors; however, because we work with clients it is also essential that we understand and have access to the tools that work for them. WFH works best when conversations about the tools you use are had up front, so that meetings, working sessions, and deadlines aren’t missed at the last minute because workers don’t have the right tools downloaded and ready to go.

The widespread need to WFH might be new, but the tools needed to be successful while doing so are already there. At Connected, we feel incredibly grateful that our way of working can be pivoted so that we are still able to deliver impactful products to our clients and can continue to be innovative in a landscape of uncertainty. With our WFH home toolkits full to the brim with inventive software, our practitioners are free to focus on what they do best: Build better products.