Bluegrass Digital CEO Nick Durrant says businesses and brands that have adopted a remote working strategy have already realised some of the benefits, including reduced costs, less time commuting, higher staff retention and increased productivity. Companies now also have access to a wider pool of job applicants at more competitive rates.
Working from Home (WFH) has unexpectedly become an essential requirement for nearly every business, and the pandemic has forced them to enable flexibility for their staff. It has certainly accelerated the pace of change and although remote working or WFH has its challenges, it also opens up opportunities and increased collaboration among teams.
There are many benefits but also some challenges related to managing a distributed team. Here are some remote work tools for distributed teams to address these challenges and enjoy more benefits.
Trello
Trello, a collaboration tool that organises projects into boards, is perfect for project and task management. The Kanban boards are flexible and tell you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. Imagine a whiteboard, filled with lists of sticky notes, with each note as a task for you and your team. Trello is not only for work environments; it is also great for maintaining your own ‘To Do’ lists. Each morning, set a routine by creating and managing your daily goals.
Doodle
Doodle is the simplest way to schedule meetings with clients, colleagues or friends. The web-based scheduling tool promises to eliminate the hassle of organising meetings via email or phone. You set up the meeting details, include however many time options you wish, and invite others via email to respond to the poll.
Zoom
Zoom brings teams together with its easy, reliable and innovative video-first unified communications platform that provides video meetings, voice, webinars and chat across desktops, phones, mobile devices and conference room systems. Zoom helps businesses create elevated experiences with leading business app integrations and developer tools to create customised workflows.
Teams
Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that provides global, remote and dispersed teams with the ability to work together and share information in their own environment. There are a range of features that combine the power of Office365, OneDrive and Sharepoint – bringing together document collaboration, one-on-one chat, team chat and more.
Serene
Serene is a free productivity tool for remote workers and teams. It helps remote workers to cut out distractions, stay focused on tasks at hand and get work done faster. The app helps remote workers to maximise efficiency by focusing on specific goals.
The app blocks distracting apps and websites and keeps staff on track to complete the task at hand. By doing this, Serene helps everyone on the team be more productive. This means tasks are completed faster and goals are achieved sooner.
Toggl
Toggl is a productivity app that is designed for teams and remote workers to maximise productivity. It is a time tracking tool that runs in the background while users work on tasks. It is essentially designed to track the time to complete tasks.
Management can also see how much time each team member is spending on individual tasks. This helps to monitor productivity and to determine whether anyone is taking on too much or too little work. In terms of productivity apps, Toggl is as simple as it gets for making sure tasks are being completed fast enough.
Slack
This is a team communication tool to make remote working and collaboration easier. The app organises all communications into specific channels, which team members can then either join or leave, ensuring that nobody receives irrelevant messages or notifications.
These conversations can also be broken down into threads, thereby keeping separate message streams outside of the main channel. This ensures that conversations don’t get in the way of main topics.
