In today’s lockdown time due to coronavirus, some businesses are not able to determine how to continue their processes while the successful businesses are smoothly carrying out their processes by enabling work from home for their employees. For enabling work from home, the successful businesses use a framework and 10 tools to run their business efficiently. This framework and tools are discussed in the video. If you are able to implement these tools, you will be able to run your business on auto mode at work from home mode and you will be able to work with more efficiency. ## #1 Framework of Work from Home For successfully implementing work from home in your business, the following three things are important: ### 1. Collaboration If you have multiple teams like marketing, HR, finance, sales, admin, and CEO’s office in your business, then collaboration across all the teams is important. ### 2. Efficiency When employees work from home, the main problem or challenge an entrepreneur encounters is that he/she is not able to determine whether the productivity of the employee is the same as they give in the office in 8 hours or not. ### 3. Tracking of Success Metrics You need to understand how you will measure and track the success of every employee. As a business owner, you make big goals but your goals are achieved by your employees in small parts. The success of every employee combines to get the success of the entire organisation. Let us discuss the 10 tools that will help you in collaborating your teams, checking the efficiency of your employees and tracking their performance effectively. ## #2 Ten Tools for Effective Work from Home ### 1. Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheet If you have a Google account, then you will get Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheet free of cost. Google Calendar is a normal calendar wherein you can record your meeting, events, and anything. For example: If you are a manager of a team of 10 -500 people and you want to conduct a meeting with your team members, then you just need to write it on your Google Calendar and all your team members will get the notification of the meeting. This will help you to track the calendars of your team members and check that their calendars are not empty. If your team member’s calendar has enough work, then he/she has to work otherwise what he/she will do at the time of reporting at the end of the day. If his/her calendar is empty, it means he/she has not done the work. Thus, Google Calendar helps in doing all the three things of the framework – Collaboration, Efficiency, and Tracking of Success Metrics. Google Spreadsheet is an excel sheet like Microsoft Excel or any other excel sheet. It is completely free of cost. It looks exactly the same as Microsoft Excel. It is an online sheet that enables all your team members to come at the same spreadsheet at a given point in time. For example: Mr. Paritosh Sharma has created a Google Spreadsheet and he wants that all his team members (50 in number) to enter when they have started their work, ended their work, and what tasks they have performed in the entire day. This spreadsheet allows all the 50 members to work on 1 sheet at the same time. This provides transparency to the manager and the owners. Google Spreadsheet also allows you to chat with your employees when they all are on the same spreadsheet. You can use this sheet on your mobile as well that solves the issue of having a laptop, desktop, or a good internet network. ### 2. Slack Slack is a collaboration App like WhatsApp. It is the best App for internal communication in a company. It is a US-based company. It enables you to form a small social network of all your employees across teams. It allows you to chat, transfer files, commenting and sending notifications across the teams. This helps in speeding up your business processes and brings efficiency in your company. Slack is free up to a specific number of users and when the number of users increases, you need to buy its services. ### 3. Facebook for Work It looks similar to Facebook but it is implemented within a company and helps in creating a social network that includes only your employees. This helps in quickly bringing your employees in an environment, the Facebook environment, which they are familiar of. It is a free tool available in multiple languages. This helps in avoiding the resistance from employees on using new technology. As almost everyone uses Facebook, so, employees can easily adopt the tool, Facebook for Work. ### 4. Basecamp Nowadays, everything in business has become a project. Some of the examples of projects are implementing work from home, making a customer proposal, implementing new things, and hiring new employees. However, the problem that arises is to handle the projects because many employees and teams are involved in completing a project. Basecamp will help you in managing a project. Basecamp.com is an easy tool that helps in managing your complete organisation. For example: Taxmantra.com is an accounting firm that has not only implemented Basecamp in their organisation but also enables its customers to implement Basecamp. So, during the billing time or when they require any document from customers, they do not call their customers instead they make a folder with their customer’s name in the Basecamp and ask their customers to upload all their files in this folder. As soon as the customers upload their files, Taxmantra.com gets the notification and they proceed further and complete the work at the right time. ### 5. LinkedIn.com LinkedIn.com is the biggest professional social network. This tool will help you to increase the efficiency of your sales team during the work from home mode. Following steps will help the sales team in the online sales: Visit the linkedin.com Search their potential customers Send a request to these customers Tell the customers about your business ### 6. Zoom The Zoom tool is used for conducting meetings using Mobile/Laptops with any type of operating system, like Android, IOS, or Windows. It helps in conducting one to one as well as one to many meetings. It provides various features like mute/unmute, video recording, etc. You just an email-Id to use this tool. You can schedule a meeting on Zoom and send the invite link to all your team members and conduct the meeting. ### 7. V-Comply Once you make an account in V-Comply (a Kolkata-based company), it will give you a software that will automatically bring all your employees on it. It will help you to denote your employees in Red, Green, and Amber colour. Non-performing employees – Red Performing and Over-performing employees – Green Middle of employees – Amber V-Comply provides in-depth information about projects, tasks, and employees. Coca-Cola uses V-Comply for all of its employees around the world. ### 8. Paytm for Business During the lockdown, payments collection becomes difficult for those companies who keep people for payment collection. For payment collections, you can use the digital tool, “Paytm for Business.” Once you download Paytm for Business, within seconds you can send the payment link to your customers. Your customers can make the payment through their Paytm accounts, UPI accounts, or Transfer payment. This tool also has a feature called, “Khata Book” wherein you can maintain all your accounts (Khata). In this Khata book, you can keep a record of how many customers you have on-boarded this month, how many customers have made the payment, how many customers have not made the payment, etc. This App is very useful for small businesses and technology companies. Paytm transfers the money maximum within 24 hours and do not take any charges for money transfer. ### 9. Google Assistant It is like your personal assistant with whom you can talk in your language whether English or Hindi. You can easily schedule your meetings using Google Assistant by only saying the time of the meeting and with whom you want to conduct the meeting. For example: If you want to schedule a meeting at 12 pm, you can say to Google Assistant, “Put up a meeting at 12 pm” and it will schedule your meeting. If you want to conduct the meeting with one of your contacts, then you say to Google Assistant, “Add Kevin in the meeting with email Id [email protected]” and your meeting is scheduled with him. ### 10. FusionCharts Some of the businessmen are not able to determine whether their employees are able to meet their targets or not. This is because of the lack of a dashboard for the complete organisation. You receive calls from your team members that this will be done that will be done but actually targets are not met. You are also not able to track the exact performance of your employees. FusionCharts can help you with this. FusionCharts looks similar to an excel sheet. You just need to add numbers on this sheet and automatically, it will make a dashboard for you. This dashboard will help you to know what is actually happening in your organisation. You can implement any of the tools discussed in the video according to the relevancy of the tool in your business. Some of the tools that are common for all businesses are Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheet, Google Assistant, and V-Comply. Basecamp and LinkedIn can also be used by all businesses.