The consulting firm Accenture has more than 500,000 employees worldwide. Before the pandemic, no more than 10 percent of them worked remotely on any given day. By the middle of March, though, nearly all of them had been sent home. Their use of Microsoft Teams — software that enables co-workers to talk, videoconference, whiteboard and chat by text with one another — erupted. The volume of video calls went up sixfold; the audio calls tripled, to 900 million minutes.

For example, we’re not going to tell you to give your employees access to useful software, like Microsoft Office, send them a Logitech webcam for their Zoom calls, or make sure their Wi-Fi connection is fast and stable. We’re presenting you with a list of ten items that can help make your employees’ work routine easier and more convenient. Exercise their imaginations and spark a little healthy competition among your remote crew by solving a new mystery together each month. They’ll work together to unlock online clues and determine “who done it” with their coworkers, while flexing their critical thinking skills off the clock.

Remote Work Starter Kit

That’s why a beautiful cheese board, like the one we’re showing you here, might just be  the perfect gift in terms of helping your employees make their free time at home special and fun. YET, we absolutely think that helping your employees remain calm, happy, and creative can improve their productivity and resilience in such a challenging time. A rather big problem for people working from home is that they work in isolation things needed to work from home and don’t have the opportunity to exchange ideas with their co-workers as much. A headset, like the one shown above, that’s of high quality and helps minimize distractions, can be particularly helpful for people who live in shared flats or live with their families and kids. For that reason, we’re focusing on some complementary, thoughtful items that can help you boost your employees’ productivity and morale.

I am incredibly lucky that ours is a beautiful, welcoming space. I also work at Starbucks sometimes, and I go full-on, hoodie-and-headphones cliche when I do, too. Most people who have to leave the office can’t bring home their desk, chair, file cabinet, printer, or desk lamp—and have to do without the company-provided snacks and beverages too. But such things are necessities for many people to work productively and comfortably at their home office over a long period of time.

Fun Hybrid Team Building Activities, Games & Ideas For Distributed Teams In 2023

It often leads to bad audio quality, echoing and misunderstanding. A good investment is, therefore, some sort of improved headset or microphone setup. Most of them run at 1080p or sometimes even 4k at 60FPS, making your image sharper on the other side, and more fluid thanks to the double frames per second. You can put that camera wherever you want, presumably at the top of your main monitor, making it seems as if you were looking at the person on the other side, not to somewhere on the side.

Among those with young children, many are finding it exhausting to juggle child care, home schooling and their jobs. A marketing director and parent of two toddlers told me her new hours were “9 to 4,” by which she meant 9 p.m. Even though remote workers are adults with professional experience and responsibility, scheduled remote check-ins and team chats should be standardized.

Improve Your Virtual Setup — Video

People found the gaze enjoyable, but only for about three seconds. “It’s almost like ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’ have come back in, like Parliament,” K.C. Estenson says. Estenson, the chief executive of GoNoodle, a seven-year-old company in Nashville that produces “movement and mindfulness” videos for elementary-school children, sent home his staff of several dozen on March 15.

The goal of the app, Bhat explained, is to let users feel as if they’re visually present with other people, without needing to actually be on camera. That also meant he could stand up or wander from his desk; so long as his laptop’s microphone still picked up his voice, I would see his avatar chatting away and gesticulating. Recently I took part in a video call with Loom.ai’s co-founders, Mahesh Ramasubramanian and Kiran Bhat. Ramasubramanian logged on as an avatar with a thick mop of dark hair swooping over his left brow, a rough approximation of his everyday appearance.