Gone are those days when walking over to a colleague’s cubicle or being summoned to the manager’s cabin for work update was a common sight. Remote working has changed this scene completely. According to a recent survey, over the last decade, remote work has steadily risen to 91%. With the current pandemic, more and more companies are forced to work remotely.
Remote teams consist of people working in different locations across the globe. Managing these teams has its own set of difficulties and challenges. Be it work visibility, cultivating a sense of belonging or trans-time zone communication. But with the growing popularity of the remote work model, it is clear that businesses around the world need to be prepared for this new scenario of distributed workforces.
How to manage the performance and engagement of someone you may never meet in person? What’s the trick? Keeping aside cultural shifts, what you need is a specific toolset to manage remote collaboration and ensure that everyone in your team feels equal and valued.
Out of so many different tools and software, how to choose the right one?
It is only with the right technological set-up that a remote work model can function properly.
A good remote working tool should be able to ensure that your employees are on track, assist them in their performance and keep the company culture alive. Even if all remote working tools are slightly different from each other, the best technology will feature:
– Resource management
– Project and task management
– Time management and calendar
– File sharing and collaboration
In order to facilitate cross-team collaboration and fully support remote workers, here are some of the best remote team management tools that everybody wants in their belts.
Slack
Slack is the first go-to communication tool that everybody loves. It is a great option when it comes to communicating among teammates, allowing them to share ideas and sharing comments in real time. This is a big one for remote workers as everyone may not be able to perform superbly outside the office space.
An open chat environment always helps in fostering a better bond among the team. Sometimes chatting in a less formal environment than a team meeting becomes the need of the hour. With Slack, you can have one-on-one chat, group chat or even break off into multiple channels to enable uninterrupted workspace.
Slack makes managing remote employees a lot easier by bringing all your team communication in one place. It’s as close as you’ll get to a virtual office. Slack provides real-time messaging, archiving and search for teams. What’s more? With this tool, you can sync all your other tools in order to receive all your platform notifications in one place.
In late 2020, Slack was in huge demand and used by Salesforce, giving them a bigger foundation to compete with Microsoft groups, which is another type of chat app and video conferencing tool.
Friday
This tool assists you to produce processes and structures in the manner that you just communicate, whether or not that is an ordinary start or a weekly team meeting.
It’s a high remote operating tool to remain connected as a foreign team. We tend to solely have two regular conferences hebdomadally (both 1-1s) as a result of Friday eliminates the necessity to share data in conferences. You can empower your team with a corporation reference and also goal-setting that links to your values and OKRs. Give thanks to one another with commendation and share water cooler conversations with our icebreaker queries.
It’s exceptionally easy to ascertain however your team is trending with automatic reportage. This aids a distributed team to keep connected and improves answerableness.
Friday additionally empowers separate remote staff to enhance their productivity with the Friday Daily Planner and Focus Time. Users can roadmap their day, create a flutter list, connect with the project management tools they use most, and even set Focus Time that stops you from visiting bound websites, therefore you’ll be able to do your best work.
Empower your staff to try and do their best work with the Friday planner.
Trello
Trello can be a nice project management and productivity tool. It is a visual thanks to managing to come and make certain things remain tracked. Supported by a Kanban approach to project management, it uses “boards” to prepare tasks and you’ll be able to produce columns with tasks within them.
It works for remote team management as a result of it clearly shows the stages for various tasks and commenting is straightforward, creating asynchronous communication easier.
Zoom
Video needs a virtual meeting – became an inevitable part of 2020 throughout the pandemic. We tend to all become too aware of Zoom as a video conferencing tool. However, you recognize what? You’ll be able to simply record the decision, and there is a spread of adjacent edges (you will hold webinars with it).
We might all have Zoom fatigue however perhaps as a result of it working too well.
Bridging the physical gap between you and your team, Zoom provides a dynamic space for holding one-on-ones, team chats and company-wide meetings as well that require breakout rooms.
Tettra
If you are looking for an easy thanks to share team or company-wide data, you must check up on Tettra.
Why must you use this? It’s pretty straightforward. As a foreign team, it is important to own some structured repository for “institutional knowledge” and file sharing. It is a core part of remote collaboration. Sure, you’ll be able to spend some time finding out one thing in Slack, however, those conversations tend to be of lower quality. The act of writing one thing down in a structured manner will increase the standard and shelf-life.
Crystal
It is often powerful for remote team members to know every other’s nuances and preferences. That is why we tend to advocate language up for Crystal and take free mental testing.
It’s a great tool for learning additional concerning individual staff and the way you’re employed along. With the results, you’ll be able to study variations fashionable for every person on your remote team. In addition, Crystal provides tools to assist you to see these temperament insights in Gmail and on LinkedIn.
Stop dead reckoning concerning however co-workers prefer to communicate, allow them to tell you instead.
ScreenFlow
If you are looking for a hi-fi technique of screen sharing with your virtual team, you will like to visualize ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow may be a mackintosh app that makes it simple to record your screen (and audio) and share it with co-workers.
It additionally has one-click commercial enterprise and file sharing to Dropbox and gif export, which is sweet.
You’ll be able to additionally record company, team conferences for folks that could also be inaccessible. It is also an amazing tool for remote user-testing sessions, as you’ll be able to instantly share the results with your team.
GitLab
If you’re an engineer (or write code), we tend to advocate GitLab. GitLab permits engineering groups to remotely collaborate around code in an organized manner. It’s like version management, however with additional options and practicality to create applications and contour deployments.
The entire company is remote yet, and that they have one in each of the foremost comprehensive handbooks on a way to work remotely you’ll realize.
Compt
Compt is another decision on our list. Compt helps you provide personalized perks to your staff, notwithstanding wherever they’re primarily based.
Most corporations provide a default set of perks as a result of the general public being during a single location. Once you have foreign personnel, it becomes harder to supply perks and rewards.
Compt offers everybody the power to choose the perks that add up, therefore most are happy. It is a compliant approach that will not get you into trouble with the IRS.
RemoteHQ
RemoteHQ may be a virtual space for remote groups that brings all of your team’s disparate tools, content, and communications along in one place.
Their major power is the ability to show all of your team’s net apps instantly cooperative (make them behave like Google Docs) with solely cloud storage, therefore everybody will collaborate in a period.
Time Doctor
For groups that want a time chase package, they tend to advocate Time Doctor. Time Doctor is beneficial for corporations running remote groups, digital agencies, package groups, and corporations with remote support agents. They’re employed by well-known corporations like Apple, Home Depot, Verizon, and more.
Miro
Even once way apart, you and your team will collaborate on totally different things with the assistance of Miro’s online whiteboard. You’ll be able to use Miro throughout synchronous conferences or maybe asynchronously, if you have got team members in several time zones.
The virtual whiteboard has an abundance of options that create the work potential endless. You’ll be able to take charge of what comes from the group action amount all the high to the finalized outcome.
Miro makes it simple for you and your team to bounce concepts off one another in a period and find the most effective work done as if you were all at once.
Threads
Threads may be a forum package if you wish to create inquiries to your team and receive responses during a place straightforward and simple to find.
You can keep your team on the right track with this forum. Produce different thread posts betting on the subject you decide on. Your team will respond once they are accessible. You’ll even be able to recall the discussions and thread, to stop things from obtaining too untidily and helter-skelter.
Final Thoughts
As additional and additional groups transition to remote work owing to COVID-19, companies have a tendency to expect to ascertain additional remote operating the package specifically designed to assist distributed groups.
It’s been superb however the technology has advanced over the past few years, and everyone is excited to ascertain what remote team collaboration and communication tools return next.
