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How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees

How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees

How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees

How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees
How Office 365 Enables Work From Home Employees

With more and more companies telling their staff to work from home, businesses are looking for solutions to allow their employees to continue get their work done and be productive, whilst they are on lock down and are unable to go to the office.

So in this race to find the best home productivity software for your employees, what do you usually think of?

Chances are you’ll think of Slack, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams and Google Suite as the main ones that your employees will be using to continue to work with clients, hold important meetings or reply to your emails and to just generally get work done.

But did you ever think about the underlying software that powers all of those and how that in itself can help you and your staff be more productive working from home?

After all, without this one application, none of your office productivity apps that your employees are using whilst they work from home can work.

Yes, we are referring to your operating system, Windows 10.

Not many people think of Windows 10 as something that can help you be productive, let alone be more productive if you are working from home – and you’d be wrong to do that.

Because Windows 10 has a few secrets that you may not know about that can help you and your employees remain productive whilst working from home as this article will explain.

Create desktops for all your teams on a single home computer

How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees

Did you know that Windows 10 allows you to create multiple virtual desktops?

Windows 10 calls it Task View and it allows you to create multiple virtual desktops that can help you keep track of what applications you use for a specific task or what programs you use when working with your team and you can easily switch between them.

Consider this example, you are a member of three separate software development teams and also several testing teams.

Each team uses their own development apps and has their own shared document repository and OneDrive.

What you could do is simply use one desktop and clutter it full of all the icons for the software and documents you need to work in all of the teams.

But that would create a very cluttered and messy desktop and over time not only would you forget where stuff is, but your computer would start up slower due to the sheer number of icons on your desktop.

This is where Task View can help you and your employees be more productive.

Using this Windows 10 feature you could set up multiple desktops, one dedicated to each team, and only put icons on the desktop or pin programs to the Start menu (a very underused Windows 10 feature) for each team.

This offers you many benefits:

  1. No unnecessary desktop icons or files

Task View allows you to create desktops for specific teams.  So, you put icons for team specific software on each desktop so that you can easily access it.  Then, when you need to move from one task to another in your workflow you just switch desktops

Not only that but each desktop is separate.  That means they each have their own taskbar and how you leave one desktop means it will be just the same when you switch back to it. 

  1. Immediately access the team resources you need

This was touched upon in the point above.  But with each virtual desktop you are more oganised and you only show the applications that are on each desktop on the taskbar which means that you now have a very efficient and fast way of working as you switch between desktops for your tasks.

  1. Work on more than one application at a time

This may sound a little strange.  But what it essentially means is that you can use the Windows 10 snap feature to split multiple windows on the same screen.

As an example, imagine you are working on a Word document, but you are also waiting for an important email.

Using the snap feature of Windows 10 you can simply ‘snap’ the Word application to the left side of your screen and then ‘snap’ Outlook to the right side of the screen.

How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees

This allows you to see more than one application at once.  You can continue working on Microsoft Word on the left side whilst waiting for Outlook to deliver that important email from your boss on the right side.  There’s no downtime in waiting or excuse that you were unable to respond in time.

With this feature you can actually ‘snap’ a maximum of four application windows to fit to one screen.

If you quickly want to minimize all of these windows you can use the ‘shake’ feature.

This is where you click the titlebar of an application, hold the mouse button down and move your cursor slowly back and forth (as if you are shaking it).  This will then cause those windows to minimize, allowing you quick access to your desktop.

Finally, the ‘peek’ feature allows you to see through all the open application windows you have open directly to the desktop screen behind it.

To do this, just place your mouse cursor over the show desktop button in the bottom-right corner of the screen (next to action centre) and then you will see all your open application windows turn translucent and will be minimised, allowing you to see the desktop behind it.  If you click the button again then the windows will appear again.

Using each of these features, along with Task View, is a really powerful way to organize all your work, applications, and documents whilst working from home so that you remain productive whilst working with multiple teams.

Connect to work computers remotely to share files from home

Using remote desktop connection, which is part of Windows 10, you can remotely connect to your PC at work (as long as it is turned on and your IT department has granted you access to do so).

This is useful because it means that whilst at home you can access resources on your work computer and just drag and drop files between both machines.

How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees

This is great if, as an example, you regularly perform data backups.

You can use remote desktop to connect to your remote backup server from home and continue to perform daily backups for your company.

Easily give your employees IT support at home

With staff working from home the IT department still needs to make sure that they are available should an employee have any issues with their computer.

Windows 10 provides a little-known remote support tool called Quick Assist that your IT staff can use to allow for employees to connect to their machine or for the support staff to connect to the employee’s machine and give them help.

When you couple this tool with Microsoft Teams it’s very easy to contact IT support to get help.

Setting up Quick Assist is simple and you either give out your unique code to allow someone to connect to you or ask someone to give you theirs if you want to connect to them.

If you are a member of the IT team who is giving remote help to an employee through Quick Assist, then you can choose to either share your screen or to take full control.  Both of these options have their advantages based on the type of support that the user needs.

And because Quick Assist is part of Windows 10 by default (just click Start and type ‘Quick Assist’) you already have a free and robust work from home IT support tool that your IT department can use to help your employees.

In addition to this, your employees can also use Quick Assist to help each other if they face issues with their computer.  They can even connect to each others machines to share data, if their IT department allows it.

How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees

Self-solve computer problems at home with a Windows 10 recovery drive

With USB media and CD-R’s being relatively cheap these days it makes sense that your employees can use either to create a Windows 10 recovery drive.

The benefit of doing this is that, when they are working from home, if something happens that means that they can no longer boot their machine normally, they can use the recovery drive to reinstall Windows 10 or troubleshoot problems, without needing to wait for IT support.

When you are creating a recovery drive (click Start > type ‘recovery’ and click ‘Create a Recovery Drive’ it is recommended to make sure ‘Back up system files to the recovery drive’ is checked.  Doing this allows you to completely reinstall Windows if you need to.

How Windows 10 Empowers Work from Home Employees

You will need a USB stick that is at least 16GB in size (bigger is better) and anything on your USB drive will be deleted first.

But there is one caveat here.  You can also only use a recovery drive that is specific to your version of Windows.

So, if your version of Windows is 32-bit you can’t use it to restore a 64-bit version of Windows and vice-versa.

But with your employees working from home it makes sense for them all to make a recovery disk so that if anything does go wrong, they can self-solve the problem and reinstall Windows and get back up and running as quickly as possible.

Share and collaborate more easily from home using Office 365 & OneDrive

With this being Windows 10, you can’t not mention how it works seamlessly with Microsoft Office and OneDrive.

Using both of these tools together whilst your employees work from home ensures that they can all continue to communicate together, collaborate together, work on files together and generally just remain up to date with their work tasks.

As an extra bonus, for those whose company uses Office, but doesn’t have Microsoft Teams yet because they may be using Slack, upgrading to an Office 365 subscription that gives you Microsoft Teams gives you a great collaboration tool that you can use to allow your employees to remain in touch with each and their teams and to still be able to have meetings.

It plugs in to all your existing Microsoft software and also can be used to connect with many third-party business applications that your company already uses so that you can access it directly from inside Microsoft Teams, which gives you a one-stop communications hub for all your employees to remain productive whilst working from home.

How Office 365 Enables Work From Home Employees

Windows 10 Is Great for Employees Working from Home

Chances are your company is already using Windows 10 for all of its computers.

So, in that case, hopefully some of these little-known work from home productivity tips will have been useful.

For companies who are still using older versions of Windows then this is a great time to consider finally taking the plunge and upgrading to Windows 10.

After all, if you have read this article and you like some of the work from home productivity tips here then you’ll need your company to be on Windows 10 to be able to take advantage of what has been shown in this article.

Windows 10 Solutions

Aware offer a suite of Windows 10 Solutions for your business.  Contact us now to learn more.