Our favorite remote work tools – for working from home

2 April 2020

Kamil Słomka – Senior Business Intelligence Consultant

Yammer is a very interesting tool that allows you to build a social network within the company! It provides mechanisms known from other media, such as thematic groups, sharing multimedia, commenting on posts, hashtags, and above all giving “likes”.

Distributed teams allow you to build one, well-used community. It works much better, e.g. than exchanging e-mails in the case of announcements or exchanging information about current events in the company, which are highly commented on by many people in the team.

Kasia Skonieczna – Controlling Expert

In addition to tools that facilitate communication such as Outlook and Teams, I like to make “To-Do lists” and set time blocks for planned and unplanned tasks during the day. A simple timer combined with simple rules, e.g. dividing the workday into focus cycles on a given task/topic helps me organize my priorities and stick to my plans (and when I change them, it is more conscious).

Thanks to this tool, at the end of the day I do not wonder where my time passed away, but I know exactly what I was doing on a given day. To structure the day and my “To-Do list” I use half-hour and hour blocks, but I have also heard about the Pomodoro method.

Ola Jakubczak – Employer Branding and Talent Specialist

Planner is my favorite tool when working remotely. I usually use Planner when onboarding people who join us at Elitmind. As remote onboarding is nothing new for us – I have been gathering tools for new Elitmaniacs in this tool for a long time. Each onboarding has its board with tasks, I can group them as much as I want, color-coded, etc.

One of the most important functions of this tool for me is the ability to assign tasks to individual people with their dates and their priority. Thanks to the Planner functions, I can see everything and know the progress of tasks on one desktop, besides, I can see where there are any doubts and where I can help.

Jacek Szczurowski – Senior Business Intelligence Consultant

Microsoft Teams is one of the applications that are simply irreplaceable during remote work. How to communicate with colleagues or clients, if not via this app? In everyday life there are personal meetings, documents can be sent by e-mail, pass a flash drive or hound to a 1.44” diskette, but how good you can feel when you can tame all this with one application?

Microsoft Teams has such tasks and advantages, you can conduct teleconferences that will simulate personal meetings, so you can discuss any topics, seeing people on the other side, and make materials available online. However, as I mentioned earlier, this application has other advantages, we can create areas relative to the project, and then share/embed them directly through the application, thanks to which all documents related to the project are available from one place.

If you need to build some documentation, then we use WIKI available Teams, which will easily document the solutions. How to run a project without coordination, nothing simpler, thanks to the integration of Microsoft Teams with DevOps, we can easily manage Epic, UserStory, Task, assignment, implementation time etc. Summarizing Microsoft Teams, their built-in capabilities and the possibility of additional integration, makes Microsoft Teams creates a virtual office for us, with conference rooms, whiteboards and all the envelope available during teamwork in the offices.