Technology: work from home
The days of being stuck in an office are gone – but what are the best tools, so you spend less time chained to a desk? The Weekly finds out.
IT’S HARD TO tell these days – is that woman sitting next to you in the cafe tapping into her iPad Facebooking with friends or hard at work? Brendan Donohoe, Executive Director of Customer Solutions at Telstra, says, “These days, mobility is key. The Cloud [storing information on the web] enables people to do anything anywhere via mobile or tablet. There is no longer a need to go back into the office if you need a document. Now, if something comes up on the weekend, you can sit on the beach and x it.
“People are not tethered to their desks any more.”
1 SIGN YOUR LIFE AWAY Even in this tech age, so many forms still need an old-fashioned signature, which means wasted time printing, scanning and sending. With the app DocuSign, you can sign, send and store documents on your mobile device, saving you hours of time.
2 THE NEW-AGE SHOEBOX The app called Shoeboxed takes photos of receipts and invoices with your mobile phone, then sorts your receipts into tax categories. This data is fully searchable and is registered with the Australian Tax Office, so you can electronically store all those paper documents in the palm of your hand – no more battered boxes bulging with tattered receipts!
3 WHERE IS THAT DOCUMENT? An app called Box stores all your content in one place in the Cloud. This means you can call up documents, photos and reports when you’re not in the office and share them with colleagues or clients, and can be accessed from any device.
4 IT’S GOOD TO SHARE The Zunos app helps you communicate with everyone from your staff to clients. You can send out presentations, videos and photos, and even distribute questionnaires or feedback forms.
Visit Telstra Apps Marketplace at marketplace.telstra.com to nd out more about these apps.
It’s not a secret that mobile devices are taking over in both work and play – a 2015 Nielsen report showed that we are joined at the hip to our smartphones – 82 per cent of us having them “always with me”, versus 27 per cent for tablets. The report also found that 55 per cent of us own a tablet and that gure is expected to increase to 61 per cent in a year.
Many offices have not yet come to the party, however, with 43 per cent of people using their own phone for work and 26 per cent using their personal tablet