The best tools that shouldn't be missing from your remote workforce's toolkit

The pandemic has triggered an increased integration of remote working in contemporary work culture. With social distancing protocols being vehemently observed, the concept of a distributed workforce is beginning to make more sense. But wait, does remote working really mean your employees get to sleep on their cozy couches all day?

Far from it, remote working isn't a holiday for your employees! If you efficiently incorporate the right remote working technologies, you can sustain the output and efficiency of collaboration from a remote workforce as you would get from a traditional on-site team. 

In this guide, we will be exploring the most critical tools that shouldn't be missing from the toolkit of your remote workforce. The tools we will be exploring help your remote working employee to stay productive and accountable, making communication and supervision as seamless as the conventional office setting.

Time Doctor

Productivity is bred in an environment of accountability, correct? It is not uncommon for remote workers to slack off because they are far from their superiors' prying eyes. Therefore, if they know they will accurately account for how they spend their time each day, your employees will be compelled to perform at a high tempo consistently.

Time Doctor is one of the best time tracking software adapted to remote working. This is a wonderful tool to cut down on wastefulness when you have a team scattered away from the office.

Of course, Time doctor merits its place on the list considering its eminent wealth of features. Let us explore some of these features that got us falling helplessly in love with Time Doctor. 

With Time Doctor, you can accurately track your team's attendance, knowing how well individuals are spending their workdays. No guess, here reportage is completely visual. 

Time Doctor gives you screenshots of users in your team, enabling you to monitor their preoccupation just like you would if they were physically in the same office with you. You can also use Time Doctor's web usage to keep accurate track which users are binging on distracting sites during work hours.

You can also maximize Reminders on Time Doctor to remind your employee of vital tasks, keeping them on their toes generally. Overall, reporting summarizes the collection of projects each user executes and the time it took that user. Lastly, Time Doctor's Payroll feature makes remunerating to your employees seamless.  

Monday 

If you are looking for an efficient project management tool for your digital team, you would be right to consider Monday. Trello is a direct alternative to Monday. Only that Monday is relatively more advanced in terms of its suite of features, getting multiple collaborations perfectly synced up.

Unlike the generality of project management apps that leverage to-do list designs, Monday steps out of the crowd, adopting a fully optimized project management platform for both the work team and the leader. 

Here both the leader and the teammates can equally set milestones for themselves simultaneously. Asana is the closest project management platform that shares this model with Monday.    

On Monday, you have multiple views allowing every stakeholder in a project to check the individual workflow, deadlines, reports, and generally have an overview of the project. It is much easier to track progress on Monday. You can readily get notifications on looming timelines, when they are reassigned, and when changes are made to the project status.    

When the team leader creates a project on Monday and assigns it, the default status is the traditional "Not Started". When designated team members start working on the project, they can update the project status to "Working On It". 

They could make further changes to the status depending on their progression on the task. They could update the status to "Done" when they have completed that task, or "Stuck" when they need a bit of guidance or clarification.

File sharing is also simplified on Monday. Users have to upload files they want fellow stakeholders (on a project) to have access to. With Monday, communication becomes so crisp so that teams can take on several tasks simultaneously, without things getting muddled up.

Pricing for Monday starts from £15/month for 2 users, moving up to £34/month if you have 5 users on your team.

Zoom

Zoom is inarguably a celebrity nowadays, as typified in the humongous spikes in its user base. Yes, you guess right, this spike is largely thanks to the pandemic. 

Zoom is one of the most efficient platforms for holding remote meetings. With Zoom, your remote workforce connects over High Definition video and audio calls. Screen sharing on Zoom is one of its greatest assets, just in case you need to lead a teammate hand-in-hand through a process.  

Zoom brings even more to the table aside from real-time visual (or audio) communication. Members in a virtual meeting can also chat without necessarily disrupting the meeting or the speaking participant. Zoom is rich with features that make remote conferencing a joy.

There is the gallery or full-screen view, as well as the co-annotation and annotation features. Should full-time participation of a member not be needed in a meeting, the host can get them to join as view only attendees who can he can mute and unmute at his convenience.

While we must have heard a lot of meeting bombing in Zoom in this COVID era, security is appreciable on Zoom. There are built-in security protocols on Zoom like password protection with Zoom recently purchasing Keybase as it aims for an end to end encryption.

Zoom also gives you scheduled and instant meeting setups as well as free options in more than 60 countries when joining meetings.

LastPass

We just talked about security. Yes, it is super important. Hackers energetically target remote teams for the perceived vulnerability in their security infrastructure. Do you feel a jolt?

It is not uncommon for remote workers to have a plethora of online accounts. Best practices advocate that you keep different passwords for these accounts. 

By the time you are running over 30 accounts, you will need more than an IQ of 400 to pick out each of your accounts' different passwords accurately. Therefore remote teams are maximizing password sharing apps that ensure team members are not locked out of applications.

LastPass is one of the most efficient team password managers around. Last Pass is unique in allocating every member of your remote workforce a master login password upon the installation of LastPass on the browsers they frequent. 

LastPass saves every password to their online accounts, automatically loading it when they want to log in to any of the team's online accounts. LastPass is compatible with several device platforms like Firefox, Maxthon, Google Chrome, AMD64 Linux, Internet Explorer 11, Opera, Safari, Android 5.0, iOS 11, Windows 7, and others.  

Spark 

Working remotely means that a lot of emails are flying in by the second, even from the colleague asking about the latest episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians. Undeniably, these loads of emails can severely drain the productivity of your remote employees.

Spark is one powerful tool for automated email segmentation. Spark intelligent apportions emails based on priority, making less important ones less prominent in your inbox. With Spark's "Smart Search", you can efficiently sanitize your inbox and snooze emails that are less urgent.

With Spark, your device isn't buzzing all day tirelessly with incoming email notifications. Spark ensures you only get notified when critical emails come in. Indeed, Spark also allows you the team email feature, which entails shared drafts, private team comments, and instant chat for teams working together on a project. Spark also feeds you with reminders, nudging you to follow up on critical emails punctually. There is the free version of Spark, while the Premium version costs $6.39/mo for each user. 

There you go! This is a revealing compilation of the tools you need to make your remote team rock while meeting deadlines. At Eula Blue, we are eager to refine your business structure, building your brand holistically, inside out. We pride in being at the forefront of innovation, maximizing revolutionary analytic and branding solutions, giving your business an enviable competitive advantage over your rivals. Feel free to book a session with us today, and let us make your business rock!