Work From Home Toolkit: Advanced Telecommuting Equipment

As we continue to navigate this ‘new normal’ many things are still uncertain – however, one thing we can count on is that working from home and remote work is here to stay. And while at first working from home seemed like a new luxury that many of us always dreamed about (who doesn’t love an opportunity to stay in comfy clothes all day instead of having to get dressed in business casual), it also became old pretty fast.

I don’t know about you, but I for one very quickly missed the desk set up I have in my office – just working off a laptop didn’t cut it for long. Since most of us rarely were working from home before, when we thinking about telecommuting equipment, we think of the basic – like a laptop or desktop computer, headphones, a microphone and a webcam.

I began to realize that equipment and technology in my office that seemed more of a ‘nice to have’ before, actually made me much more productive, improved the quality of my work, and also overall just made me feel more comfortable and improved my work from home experience.

So if you’re like me, and you’re ready to take your remote work to the next level, you may want to consider upgrading to some of the advanced telecommuting equipment below.

The first thing I missed when it came to working from home was my dual-monitor set up. For the majority of job roles, mine included, while it is possible to work from home using a single screen, there are benefits associated with using a dual-screen setup, including the ability to multi-task more effectively. For instance, when you have a second screen, you can view two applications at the same time, without needing to switch between them.

This can pay dividends in terms of productivity and can also make it easier to make side-by-side comparisons. Your second screen may be a second computer monitor – and this is often the preferred option – but you could equally deploy a tablet as your second screen and use it to perform supplementary tasks, such as calculations.

One potential alternative here, and a concept growing in popularity all the time, is the use of ultra-wide monitors and the advantages and disadvantages of this, when compared to dual-screen setups, has been the subject of some considerable debate recently, with ultra-wide screens removing the ‘bezel gap’ associated with two monitors. When you pair this with a screen-splitting software solution, like ViewSplit, it provides the same benefits.

In organizations with a large number of employees, or in job roles where collaboration and delegation of tasks is of the utmost importance, it can be useful or even essential to have some form of project management, task planning or productivity software. This will then allow you to organize work tasks, create work plans and manage larger projects. Often, the chief benefit of a project management system is the provision of a project hub, where communication can be centralized, allowing all members of a team to sing from the same hymn sheet, even when working independently.

The precise project management system or productivity software you opt for will depend on the nature of your work, the demands associated with managing your tasks or projects, and the types of applications you may need it to integrate with. For example, the Microsoft Planner package can be effective for organizing teamwork in a visual way and might be an ideal option if you already use other elements of the Microsoft Office 365 platform.

Put simply, digital whiteboarding solutions are software solutions, which recreate the functions associated with the digital whiteboards you might see in classroom or training environments, or in office meeting rooms. When faced with the challenge of how to work from home as effectively as you do in an office, they may just hold the key.

One of the major challenges associated with a switch to remote working, a Fortune article points out, is learning how to give presentations with the same effectiveness you would have in-person. Nonetheless, with the right telecommuting equipment and a digital whiteboarding solution, this is an obstacle that can be overcome. It is also worth noting that digital whiteboarding solutions like myViewBoard can hugely improve remote collaboration efforts, because the screen can be shared between different remote workers, with real-time annotations added. With that being said, a touch screen will be required, and the larger the screen, the better.

The basic equipment for working from home may be sufficient for some workers, but many will have more complex needs. Advanced monitor set-ups, digital whiteboarding solutions, and project management software are just a few examples of more advanced telecommuting equipment that may be useful.