A noticeable cold war goes between employees who work in office vs. who work from home, as most consider “work from home” or remote work culture is less productive. The mindset has improved a lot in the recent years where remotely working employees has shown great amount of commitment and productivity when they work in their favorite environment. Remote Work Tools play a key role where technology enables improved communication and productivity of the employees. While most of us still believe that office environment is a dynamic environment and brings engagement towards your work, unfortunately the recent events of Corona Virus (CORVID-19) have forced us to be in-doors and adopt to the remote work culture. Most of the businesses were not ready for this and now facing challenges to operate their businesses, employees and clients from home.
To ease the pressures on startup founders, small and medium size businesses, we have come up with a list of Remote Work tools which are going to reduce your challenges. Here are 15 popular tools which will bring engagement and productivity among your employees while doing remote work.
Best Project Management Tools
Basecamp
Basecamp is one of the most popular project management tools for clients, remote workers, managers, teams and agencies to communicate, collaborate and manage their projects effectively. When a project is carried out through remote work tools like Basecamp, it provides features to share ideas, organize tasks and conversations and ensure the information is aligned across all project members.
Trello
One of the simplest project management tools with zero learning curve, Trello provides the best in class user experience, clean and clear-cut task management, customizable approach and scheduling of your daily tasks. Trello helps you to create tasks from macro to micro level and still avoid ambiguity among your team members. The tool ensures transparency and encourages synchronization between all remote work members across all the Trello boards. Furthermore the tool is available across platforms – laptops, mobile phones and tablets to manage your work from any device and any place.
Airtable
Airtable is one of the best examples of how to ensure employees find the project management tool engaging. Airtable is part spreadsheet and part database, where it provides maximum flexibility to teams to organize and execute their tasks across all remote working members. Variety of task views like Grid, Calendar, Kanban, Gallery and Form – where teams can choose which view is suitable for their projects. A perfect remote work tool to define project workflows using blocks, which gives an experience of using apps. Airtable provides in-built templates designed by industry experts based on the type of projects you want to manage.
Asana
Asana helps your team to manage your project from day 1 to deadline, without getting hassled shuffling spreadsheets, emails and other tools. Asana is a multi-purpose project management tool which not only serves to engineering teams but also quite helpful for marketing, sales and human resources teams. When you are planning to adopt remote work tools, Asana is one of the simplest yet most organized tool which helps your team members to keep track of progress, improve collaboration, stay alert on deadlines and streamline communications.
Monday
Monday gives a single interface insight of your project progress and relevant tasks. Engaging visualization and insights are some of the key points where Monday stands out in comparison to other project management tools. Whether it is about project roadmap, task management or resource allocation – Monday has defined specific templates for effective tracking and management of your team activities. At one glance, Monday provides a timeline view of all projects and deadlines; highlights approaching deadlines; helps to track tasks and progress and shows engaging reports on project status.
Best Time Management Tools
Timely
Timely will come on top when we consider automation in time tracking and management where project and team planning, all the team time management, automatic time tracking and project time management are done. Timely provides a transparent insights over resource mapping and schedules, plans and on-going efforts based on which companies can schedule tasks effectively and balance work across resources.
Teamdeck
When are considering an employee-friendly tool, Teamdeck is must to consider as it provides flexibility to remote workers to set their availability and also provides a single dashboard with valuable information regarding employee work patterns. Based on the resource availability, it helps project managers to schedule activities within the team (for both remote and part-time employees). Employees can record time spent on each project easily and then it gets converted to timesheets automatically.
Everhour
Everhour successfully hails itself as one of the most effective time tracker for smart teams, where it helps with accurate time tracking with quick invoicing and payroll management. Starting from project budgeting, timesheets, clock-in, clock-out, breaks, team pulse (which explains effective and productive team), tasks management, resource planning and invoicing – all of these features under one tool. On top of that, Everhour works inside popular project management tools like Trello, Asana, Basecamp and Jira.
Time Doctor
Time Doctor is more or less a better version of Everhour, where it is loaded with features like automated screenshots to help track activities, chat monitoring, helps to track time to clients and each projects, and provides powerful reports with details and timesheets, insights over apps and website usage, alerts against over usage of apps to improve productivity, helps to track breaks and time spent away from the computer. Time Doctor integrations support variety of project management and task management tools like asana, Trello, Slack, Github, JIRA, Todoist, Google Apps, etc and allows full customization based on requirements.
Timecamp
Timecamp itself promotes remote working culture where they pitch the tool as one of the easy to use tool to stay transparent with your team while working remotely. Timecamp is a proper remote work app for your home office where teams can track efforts based on fixed price projects or hourly priced projects. Timecamp provides one-click visual time tracking and also allows GPS location tracking where the managers can know the actual location of their employees through their mobile apps. Timecamp is available across web and mobile platforms with integrations across popular project management tools.
Best Collaboration Tools
Slack
One of the most successful and widely used app for team collaboration, Slack has changed the way how teams work across organizations. Slack not just encourages you make channels (both public and private) based on your requirements, yet additionally allows calling to individual team members, hash-labeling significant discussions, handling threads for important replies, document sharing, slack bot for significant updates, mixes with applications like Dropbox, Zoom, Google Calendar, Skype and a lot more applications.
The FREE release accompanies a 10,000 number of messages for your organization and all the discussions will be documented past 10,000 messages. You can prefer to go with the PRO version of Slack to ensure your team’s messages are not lost ever.
Dropbox
Need to keep store of your videos, sounds, pictures, project documents or even code back-ups? Dropbox furnishes FREE storage of 2.5 Gigabyte where you can store documents and work together with your colleagues, simply providing access to the respective documents and folders. With easy to use and simply drag-drop features it helps you to stay synced across web and mobile platforms, and let you access files from anywhere from your laptop or mobile phones.
Zoom
Zoom is the leader of enterprise video communications, which provides seamless video and web conferencing across platforms. Whether you work in office or work from home, Zoom helps you connect with team members through video conferencing. Zoom is an effective remote work tool which ensures security and privacy of all users, where end-to-end encryption of all meetings, password protection and role-based user security. Zoom has in-built collaboration features, team chat feature, calendar integrations with Outlook, Gmail and iCal, meeting recordings and transcripts.
Invision
When you are considering collaboration between your creative design team members, Invision comes into the mind first as it provides unmatched user experienced to users. Prototyping is much more powerful than other tools and helps to achieve your prototyping goals on the go where you can access the app through your phone and collaborate with your team members. It can import Sketch and can generate live preview on mobile devices, sharable links across teams and clients.
Draft
Collaboration over document versioning, presentations, document sharing over emails, cloud synchronization, publishing your documents and also image hosting – some of the major features you find in Draft. While working on a document which is shared across team members for editing, sometimes it is quite frustrating to keep track of changes. Draft allows effective version control and keeps the master copy safe always. Draft is integrated with platforms like Evernote, Google Driver, Dropbox, Box to import documents easily and can also publish documents to platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Remote Work Tools play a key role where technology enables improved communication and productivity of the employees.
If you have suggestions about apps which can help a startup to increase their productivity, please send them to us at chiefmag2017@gmail.com or comment in the below section.
