How Technology Has Altered Your Work-Life Balance

If you work 48 weeks a year and spend 5 hours a week conservatively getting to and from work, you are spending 240 hours a year driving. This takes time away from family, hobbies, friends, and much more. How can you take advantage of technology to make up for that time?

Until recent years, the only option for work was physically going to an office to work 40 to 50 hours a week behind a congested desk surrounded by people with whom you may or may not enjoy working. As technology has evolved, so has the flexibility of working in the office, at home, on the beach, or elsewhere.

While technology makes it easier for employers to allow telecommuting, there is still a trust factor that comes into play. There are ways that each employer can measure productivity differently, but some employers just feel more comfortable knowing with certainty that their employee is at their desk at a specific time each day. Another consideration for employers is the morale of employees who are not working from home while someone else is allowed that luxury. Should they have 1 happy employee and 10 unhappy employees or 10 happy employees and 1 unhappy employee? Rather than examine the struggles of employers facing this decision, let’s examine the technologies that make working from home a reality much more often than 20-30 years ago.

If an employer decides to allow telecommuting, there are several tools on the market that safeguard your investment.

Worksnaps: This tool allows an employer to monitor how productive the employee who works from home has been during the day. Less detailed tools are available, but this one doesn’t leave much room for the employee to work. Beyond monitoring time spent on productive schedules (Facebook is not one of them), the tool takes screenshots of the worker’s computer screen throughout the day to make sure the employee is productive while showing. activity on your computer. They will even count the number of mouse and keyboard clicks.

Internet – This is pretty obvious, but probably the most important tool. The Internet allows you to communicate with members of your team, your company, and any external customers. Many companies have web-based products that they use to host databases or other tools that are essential to the job tasks of their employees.

Google Docs – This is free for anyone with a Gmail account. It provides Microsoft-based tools to people no matter where they are in the world. Google documents can be accessed to share documents, either for informational purposes or for each member of a team to edit the document. If you don’t have Microsoft programs on your home computer, this is a great way to use them. They don’t have the most current benefits of current programs, but they will work in a pinch.

Trello – This is a popular tool that enables project management across your entire team regardless of everyone’s location. This can be used for people to organize to-do lists or monitor projects, so everyone knows where the team is. The program allows you to divide the project into segments that can be observed more closely as the project progresses.

Zoho – This is another project management tool, but it seems to have a large number of features, including the overlapping features that I have already discussed. There is the ability to monitor time spent on projects, offers graphs and written documentation of the progress of the specific projects the team is working on, a calendar that the entire team can contribute to and view, document sharing capabilities, Notes for recording specific information. obstacles or errors that need to be resolved. This is just the tip of the ice in terms of the capabilities of this tool. The cost is relatively inexpensive and ranges from $ 0 for limited access to $ 100 / month / employee for all accesses.

Yammer – This is described as Facebook for work. This platform allows an employer to send only relevant information to employees. Then employees can communicate within their specific teams to achieve the goals.

Skype – This is a free service that enables face-to-face communication between employees. The tool is web-based and allows you to involve multiple people in conversation / collaboration.

· GoTo Meeting – This is a great tool for webinars as it will allow you to broadcast to hundreds of people to join. Also, for those who cannot attend the meeting or want to view the meeting a second time, the meetings can be recorded. You can share your screen with those who signed up for the meeting, allowing for project collaboration or even training.

Viewflux: There are several sites aimed at designers, viewflux being one of them. These sites allow you to share your designs with a group of people. Those people can specify the changes they want to make by bookmarking the page. Have you ever wanted someone to change something about a graph and try to describe in several words what only a few words and an arrow could describe? These sites make a huge difference to designers and their clients and team members.

Dropbox: If you have files larger than Google Drive can fit, Dropbox is an option for sharing files with your team. According to Dropbox, this is a secure way to share files.

· Agile: This is a great tool for marketers and people with large networks to stay organized. This tool combines your email and social media contacts into a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. The tool even links the conversations you’ve had with these contacts, so you can remember the contact in that specific context.

These are just some of the tools that people can use when working from home or even in the office. The potential for collaboration with tools can simplify processes that need change for a long time. In addition, the teleworker can easily connect and contribute to the projects they are working on in the office. Without these connections, the telecommuter could be quickly ignored as part of the dynamics of the department with which he once worked in person.

While some may argue that society is more disconnected from each other than ever, consider that technology is not an obstacle to our efforts to communicate, but rather an advantage. I would argue that society is communicating more efficiently, more frequently, and more effectively than ever because of technology.

Imagine being able to work from 7: 00-4: 00 and being able to start dinner at 4:05 instead of 5:05. You now have time to patiently help the kids with their homework, easily pick up the kids from soccer practice, and spend time focusing on your spouse. The pressure to get things done can decrease as the level of technology increases if we take advantage of both. What would the ability to telecommute mean for your life? Are you currently doing it? What have you found beneficial?

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