5 Tech Tips to Keep in Mind as You Work From Home

The world has become more acquainted with the work-from-home model owing to COVID-19. It’s more than likely to stay as an alternative option to working from the office even after the pandemic is long gone—and you might find yourself to be someone who prefers to continue working remotely.

If this is you, it’s important to know the ins and outs of the technology that facilitates the same. This will enable you to have a smoother experience working from home, and your colleagues and team members will appreciate this as well.

What follows in this guide are 5 tech tips that you should keep in mind for remote work.

Tip#1: Using the right tools for team collaboration 

It’s important that you utilize the right applications or tools when your work involves dependencies amongst team members. Being able to give your colleague a deliverable on time ensures that there is no disruption in the pipeline and work is moving smoothly as well. 

Say you’re a social media marketer who needs to resize images to fit a platform’s image requirements. Instead of calling upon the designer to do this task, you can actually do it yourself by using an appropriate tool that is easy to use. This will require some research on your part—but it will definitely reduce the workload that your colleagues have and will also reduce any inefficiencies arising from work halting due to too many dependencies. 

Another example is if you are an Apple user and are wondering how you can edit image size, read a guide on how to quickly resize images on a MacBook. It might take a bit of time to get the hang of tools and other work-related processes when you are at home, but it is part of the transitional period where you become acquainted with remote work.

Tip#2: Troubleshooting problems yourself

While you definitely require help from the IT department to get your work-from-home set up sorted out, try to minimize raising a support ticket every time you run into a problem.  

Given that many of your co-workers might be facing these issues themselves, IT support officials might be having a tough time handling the volume of calls and complaints that they might receive. 

Regardless of the particular complaint that you may have—-it could be troubleshooting issues you might be facing with a remote access software like Teamviewer—try to see if you can find a fix yourself.

Tip#3: Using proper audio setup to ensure audio quality during calls

This is an often overlooked component of a work-from-home setup—but if done right—it can improve the quality of your video calls and video conferencing to a great degree. 

Invest in a microphone of a good build and quality, and try to have the same hooked up properly to your computer and the video conferencing application of your choice. USB microphones tend to be used for video calling as well as streaming purposes, so you can invest in one to improve your audio. 

Tip#4: Being mindful about digital security 

Given that professionals who deal with sensitive data on a daily basis are working from home, it is easy for them to slip up and fall prey to a phishing ploy or a cyberattack. Hackers exploit different techniques to get access to sensitive data—like fake emails from higher-ups to juniors asking them to make certain financial transactions, asking for login information to gain access to company tools, credit card information, and so on. 

A good method to catch this is to look for anything suspicious in the URL. If the content displayed on the screen seems like an application that you use at work, but the URL indicates that something strange is going on—avoid clicking on anything or entering your details. 

Tip#5: Backing up your files on your work computer

Given that there are greater digital security vulnerabilities due to the work-from-home setup, it is important that you create backups for all your work files. 

This could be offline backups or cloud-based solutions—if you happen to lose your files due to a cyber-attack or hardware and software damage, you can easily go back to using the copy of the same files that you have stored elsewhere. 

While it may be an arduous task to do this when you’re dealing with a large volume of data and files, you can easily automate this such that it will happen in the background as you use your computer. You don’t have to create backups manually each time you wish to have a copy of your work files. 

So those were the 5 tech tips that you can follow in order to have a more seamless work from home experience—we hope this guide has been handy.