Our tools for the home office

Home office has been the dream of many employees in the digital industry, and not just since Corona. But you'll soon find out that it's not always easy. Whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages is something that each company and each employee must decide for themselves. Once the choice has been made in favor of a home office, the next challenge comes the next challenge: choosing the right tools. In this article, we list the tools that help us get through the Corona crisis particularly effectively.

Slack

Not just since the Home Office days, Slack, has been our communication tool of choice. Since we no longer sit right next to each other, all the more important. exchanging pictures simple video chats, short discussions. All of this is done via Slack at our company.

Since all important document are managed by another cloud service at our company, Slack is an ephemeral medium for us. It's totally fine that after 10,000 messages, the history gets deleted (well, sometimes it's annoying). Those already on Office 365 will probably be happier with Microsoft Teams as it integrates seamlessly with the other tools in the suite. Of course, for those who want to self-host. Rocket Chat.

Google Meet

It's not the coolest, but it's already inside the package for us. Google Meet. We can see the whole team via video, share our screens, talk to customers.

In fact, in the meantime, we no longer need contact with the customer on site. That wouldn't be a good idea for a product that costs 10 EUR. You quickly learn to interpret the customer even if they are hundreds of kilometers away. And especially important, one learns which jokes also work at long distance.

Jira

Tidiness is half the battle. It's a phrase I'm sure we heard a lot from our parents when we were growing up. And now from us. Because when you're already not sitting down together, you have to find an find an orderly channel for distributing tasks and writing down questions about them. We use Jira in the cloud variant, do our sprint planning and the reviews with it. In our company, it's not only the techies who work with the issue tracking tool, but also parts of the sales and marketing team.

Stripe App

The Stripe app should stand here as a placeholder for a whole range of mobile apps. We have found out that especially in the home office we need up-to-date data in various situations. once needs current data. Because if you can divide your time a little more freely, you don't have to work eight hours at a stretch and you certainly don't always have your laptop with you when you leave the house for a short while. with you when you leave the house for a short time.

Apps on the workday that we often have installed in the team are:

• Stripe - To monitor bookings on koality.io and Leankoala.
• Jira and Slack - We have already described.
• Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - We do a relatively large amount on social media and everyone on the team is allowed to post. Therefore, everyone should also be "always ready".
• LastPass - Secure passwords on the go.

If you use a particularly important service on your laptop, then you should also see if there is a suitable app for it. They're usually not as powerful as their desktop counterparts, but they're still useful.

Disney+ and Co.

If one of you should join us one day, it's important to know that we watch an episode of a nerd series together every Friday during lunch break. Therefore it is currently important that all employees have a Disney+ account. So far, it's been "Picard" and "The Mandalorian." But we are always open to new series. As next, it could be "friends." After all, we have younger people in the team.

Why we do this is clear: team building. It's not always easy when the teams are very far apart and you only have professional contact. That's why we had to find something that welds us together, but we don't have to leave the house.

Yoga easy

Get up in the morning, shower, get to your desk. Work. 8 meters to the kitchen. Warm up pizza. Eat at laptop. Work. End of work. 5 meters into the living room. WATCHING TV. Sleeping. Repeat.

Do you find yourselves here? There used to be some exercise involved, at least during lunch breaks and on the way to work. And if you don't find a balance, then it can quickly become quickly become physically problematic. Many of us are developers and not athletes. Even though it's not mutually exclusive, it's statistically unlikely.

We like yoga and since a good friend "StartUp" is doing something with the topic, we want to recommend Yoga easy to you. Just have a look. Many cool courses and a lot that will help you not to have back problems at 40.

koality.io

Of course, our Website Monitoring Tool can also help in the home office. Especially when communication is not always so easy, it helps to have a Dashbaord, on which the current quality of all websites can be seen. A dashboard that the whole team can access. Then at least you don't have to worry anymore, that problems are not found at customers first, because nobody felt responsible.

Those were our little helpers for the home office. Of course, this list is not exhaustive, as we are only at the beginning of the home office phase. If you have any good additions do not hesitate to send them to us.