The move towards remote work has tripled in the last 15years. The coronavirus outbreak accelerated this trend and millions of employees worldwide started to work from home to stay safe. It is estimated that around 30% of the remote workforce will be following a hybrid work model by the end of 2021.
By now we already know how remote work has helped employees to bring a balance in their work and personal life. Recents surveys show that around 80% of remote employees say they are more productive when working from home. Now more than ever, it is necessary for businesses to establish best practices for remote employee engagement for seamless and secure ways to perform their task. But modern business is complex, while digital tools like file sharing, videoconferencing, project management and employee monitoring software have made the transition easier.
Going remote is a tough call for many organizations, but there are many benefits of shifting to remote workforce and hiring remote talents. One of the biggest advantages is remote work has increased productivity, decreased burnout and expanded the capacity of hiring pool to reach the best talent across the globe. Though businesses suffer a bit due to the different time zones of different workers, the use of advanced communication tools can help us eliminate the issue. Also, managing a remote workforce is not an easy task. With the use of the right tools and techniques businesses can assimilate and improve remote talents. Need recommendations for the list of advanced tools to support your remote employees? Here is a list of a few useful tips we believe deserve a closer look.
- Google Suite: G suite is a Google cloud storage platform that permits remote teams to collaborate on Google Docs, slides, sheets and many other Google Drive tools. This is the most popular platform for any remote team to work together from a distributed location and keep their work organized in one secure and centralized location. The platform allows employees to create assets without making duplicate copies and sending them to emails to fellow workers. G Suite has shown us how easy it is to share important documents with the enrite remote team- instantly and affordable. Another best part is all happening in real time. Even in 2022, if you are still counting on legacy tools to share documents, it’s time for an upgrade.
- Trello: Trello is an easy to use and simple management tool that lets you create a dashboard to organize your schedules, track assignments and store docuemtns. The dashboard features a huge category for improved project management and tasks related to it. The tool is extremely essential for remote tools, where you will never miss even a tiny task. It also helps you to mention any Urgent task simply by creating a red card tag and attach it to the appropriate channel. You will be able to see project deadlines for individual employees as well as team progress through its activity dashboard.
- Slack: Slack is perhaps one of the most popular instant communication apps today. Slack has replaced the traditional internal email process to a quick one-on-one, group and company-level chats organized by channels. This collaboration software lets teams communicate faster to make approval processes easier and keep the entire remote team in-the-know.
- Zoom: Using Zoom is a child’s play. The easy to use app is a simple conference solution for team video and audio calling. Zoom offers both free and paid versions. Hatica is ideal for async standup meetings, the platform can host up to 1,000 participants, and you can also record meetings for future reference.
- CloudDesk: CloudDesk is an ideal remote employee monitoring software specifically for businesses that have globally distributed teams. CloudDesk makes it easy for businesses to track work data of employees and produce automatic productivity reports based on it. CloudDesk features includes time tracking, activity tracking, screenshots, employee productivity analysis, engagement checking, gps tracking, efficiency dynamics as well as other vital features to ensure your employees are working as per company requirements.
The employee monitoring software makes your remote team more productive and saves your valuable time. You can also keep track of where employees are spending their time in real-time. - Evernote: No one knows the importance of note-taking apps unless they use one. Keeping record of your to-do list in paper or word document may seem an easy thing to do. But how do you handle a long to-do list and how do you actually organize it to be easily searched and take actions- especially in a remote work environment. Evernote makes your not-taking task easy and can be easily organized. You can create notes rich with links, images and recording, the best part is you can use the app offline. Evernote synchronized across all of your devices.
Hope you found this article insightful and managed to find valuable tools to solve your problems to manage your remote teams better. Year 2022 is a big year for businesses, after a 2 years of pandemic every business has again resumed to work at full throttle. Now in 2022, location does not matter, what matters most for businesses is productivity and efficiency. Today, you should have the tools to support your remote employees to effectively perform their task. Giving them the access to the right resources will only increase their productivity and bring fruitful results for your business.