The future of work is no longer an abstract concept: what once seemed a distant prospect has abruptly turned into an everyday reality for many businesses, courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic. With most employees now forced to carry out their jobs at home amid locked-down cities, companies across all industries are starting a new chapter – one called 'remote working for everyone'.

More prosaically, the imperative to switch entire workforces of organizations small and large to working from home, sometimes in a matter of days, has given some employees endless to-do lists and rather long hours. CIOs and their teams, who are responsible for leading their company's technology strategy, have been having a busy few weeks. 

The CIO's role right now consists of making sure the technology architecture of their organization enables employees to keep working productively, even from their homes. In the current context, this has often meant setting up entire systems for remote working, even before a full lock-down made it impossible for colleagues to come into the office and ask the IT department for help with unforeseen issues. 

In the UK, for instance, Leeds City Council got 11,500 office-based employees ready to work from home in the course of a weekend. The organization's digital services team had to get 7,000 laptops ready-to-go in just three days, before the full impact of the spread of COVID-19 began to hit home.

SEE: Working from home: Success tips for telecommuters (free PDF)

The new normal telecommuting may be a bit more permanent than realized, as 74% of CFOs say they expect to move previously on-site employees remote post-COVID-19, according to a Gartner survey.

The survey, which had 317 CFO respondents on March 30, highlighted how remote work may become more of the norm as companies look to cut commercial real estate costs.

One of my working theories about the COVID-19 crisis was that the percentage of telecommuters would swell as enterprises realized they could be as effective and save money on commercial real estate. We've chronicled the remote work shift week to week during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Gartner found that almost a quarter of respondents said they will move at least 20% of their on-site employees to remote work permanently. The research firm is taking the pulse of the COVID-19 CXO shifts in a series of surveys.

Among the key shifts from CFOs and enterprises as they manage cash via COVID-19 shutdowns:

With unprecedented pressure on home internet connections because of work from home changes because of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, UK's communication regulator Ofcom has published a list of practical tips for improving the speed and reliability of your home network.

Some of the tips are pretty obvious, such as testing your internet speeds regularly (I use Speedtest for this, but Ofcom has a decent list of others that provide this service), try wired rather than wireless, password-protecting your Wi-Fi so others can't leech off it, and getting in touch with your service provider if things get bad.

It also has some less useful tips -- unless your browser is awfully old, updating it is not going to make much difference at all. Also, I find that upgrading routers doesn't do that much, unless you're upgrading some serious enterprise-grade hardware such as Amazon eero, Netgear Orbi, or Ubiquiti Networks UniFi. It's worth bearing in mind that a lot of home internet service providers don't support third-party routers, so if things go wrong, you'll have to switch back to the original hardware (so don't throw it away), or you're on your own.

Must read: Coronavirus social distancing got you down? Tips and tricks to help you get through it

But the list does bring something up that home users might not be aware of that might be slowing things down. And that is that some electrical devices, such as dimmers, can cause interference and affect internet speeds.

Over the past few weeks, a lot of people have found themselves working from home. For some, the idea of working from home is a dream come true (excluding the circumstances that conspired to make that a necessity). 

But working from home raises a number of challenges, and those challenges become even more of an issue when those remote workers have to collaborate with other team members. To keep productivity and morale up, teams will need tools to come together online, to collaborate in real-time, and work as though they were still in the same building. This is vital. And these days trying to make do using email, the odd to-do list, and video conferencing alone just doesn't cut it.

Integration is key, and team members working remotely need the right online collaboration tools and project management tools that bring together features such as instant messaging, video calls, screen sharing, and time tracking to help them get the job done. Let's take a look at the best online collaboration tools currently on offer.

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