The technology every hybrid employee needs to make work easy, productive

As workplaces reopen, more of us are splitting our time between home and the office – with some third places, such as a local coffee shop or co-working space, thrown into the mix. Even if you were one of the lucky few who got the tools and support from your employer’s IT team when you set up your home office, it’s time to start your work week (or workday). Rethink that setup to address the particular challenges of splitting ) between different locations. ,

Here are five things every hybrid worker wants in their tech tool kit to make sure their job is as smooth and productive as possible.

mobile brainstorming software

Most of the reason you go to the office is to take advantage of the spark that you only get when you are face-to-face with your colleagues. The ideas and innovations that emerge from those meetings are usually reinforced by continuing the conversation over lunch or scheduling a follow-up meeting for the next day.

It’s hard to keep up the pace when you’re all out of a meeting and headed home for a few days of remote work. That’s why it’s important to have brainstorming and note-taking tools that make it easy for you to continue with your personal work when you get back home.

Instead of a physical whiteboard, use a cloud-based mind-mapping or virtual whiteboard tool like MindMeister or Miro to capture suggestions from across the room, and project them onto the board as the conversation unfolds. These apps let you capture each idea with a word or phrase, and then link them together as a tree or flow chart.

If you can’t remove the group from their dry-erase board, take a snapshot of the board when the meeting is over, and import the photos into a digital notebook app that offers optical character recognition. That way your whiteboard photos will be text-searchable, so you don’t have to scroll through your photo roll to find a board that includes that note about “new product strategy.”

bag on the go

In my long years of remote work I’ve found that I’m more focused and productive if I get out of the house, even at home—that’s why I keep a backpack packed with items for me. Easier to get out the door and settle in a coffee shop again. (I recently started doing it again!)

When you’re spending some of your workweek in third place, you can’t depend on any gear other than what’s in your backpack. That means you need a spare and extra-small version of all your essentials, permanently stored in your go bag. (If they come out of your bag at home, you might not have them when you go to the coffee shop.)

I always have the smallest laptop charger in my backpack I could find—with the longest power cable I could buy, because I can’t always find a table near an outlet. I also carry a USB keychain with a double-ended plug (so it can plug into a USB-A or USB-C port), a fully charged phone battery, in case my Bluetooth earbuds run out of power. A set of corded headphones in, and a dongle that lets me plug in headphones and power at the same time.

One more thing: I subscribe to a VPN service, which passes all my internet traffic through a private network. This is an important security measure to protect my privacy and data when I am on a public Wi-Fi network, such as at my favorite coffee shop.

tablets for train

If you drive to work during your office days, you can listen to podcasts, audiobooks, or articles you’ve saved (if you use a text-to-speech app). Or you can relax with music.

However, if you travel by train or bus, you have a few more options to help you make a seamless transition between travel and the office, and then between transit and home. Most Important Component: A small laptop or tablet with a keyboard or stylus so you can handle email or even draft documents. It also pays to use applications that make it easy to get up and running when you arrive at your destination. I use a small utility program that stores my open apps and windows as a group: when I commuted, set to launch Word, Excel, and Outlook when I get into the office, And when I got home I had launched a browser window with Facebook and Netflix. , If you use different computers at home and at the office, use the same browser in both places and keep it synced so that you have the same extensions and bookmarks available in both places.

time trackers

One of the dangers of hybrid work is that you break out of the rhythm that most of us have when we’re at home or at the office full-time: when each day of the week has its own space and time. It’s hard to get into a consistent routine and pace.

To save my precious homework time from the dangers of the Internet, I use a time-tracking app that runs in the background and tells me where all my time has gone. Once you know where you waste time or lose focus, you can use parental controls to block your access to problem apps or sites during the workday. If you have a similar challenge at the office, you can use time-tracking software there too—or use your time-tracking report to show how hard it is to get uninterrupted time at the office, And use it to make a case for spending more days at home.

bigger screen

Many workers traditionally lead a double life when it comes to their screen experience: they use a laptop at home and a larger work-provided monitor—or monitors—at the office.

Maybe it works when you’re at home a few days a month. But if you are truly a hybrid, and work at home several days a week, this will not happen. Wherever you are working, you should have several large screens.

I say that as someone who has worked on laptop screens over the past decade. Once the pandemic forced me to start writing from home instead of in coffee shops and on airplanes, however, I discovered the joys of working with big screens – more and more of them. Even a large external monitor can dramatically increase your productivity during your days at home. When you draft that report on your big, main screen, all of a sudden you’re able to see that entire spreadsheet, or halfway through the Slack messages coming in on your laptop.

Adding a second full-size monitor to the setup gives you a virtual portal for co-working. Dedicate that monitor to your videoconferencing software, and you can chat with coworkers (and actually watch them!) while you work together on a shared document, or use a cloud-based project-management tool. Planning a marketing campaign using

The downside of all this, of course, is the expense. And that’s why electronics manufacturers and retailers will likely win big from the proliferation of hybrid work.

But employers and employees stand to win big, too. It is important to have tools to minimize friction and maximize benefits for a fractured work life.

Dr. Samuel is a technology researcher and co-author of “Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work… Where You Are”.