6 Tools That Will Help You Manage Your Teams Remotely

1. Online Professional Platforms

Online Professional Platforms primarily allow you to gain access to
third-party companies that can carry out a part of the business process
for you. Companies such as Supersourcing provide you access to software
development partners. They are host to experienced and competent
professionals who can save you the cost and time of hiring a complete
development team.

Additionally, you do not have to hire third-party developers and bring
them on to the company payroll or manage these developers as your
employees. All you need to do is communicate the required tasks and
assess their output.

2. Communication

The main challenge that companies faced when remote work started was
that of communication. Since employees would generally meet up at the
office, setting up an online communications system was generally not
bothered with several industries.

During remote work, employees need to communicate with each other
through text and voice calls. Additionally, they need to transfer files,
images, and other media forms to each other in the same conversation
thread. More, they might need to create groups at a project level,
functional level, and team level.

One of the most efficient tools to manage your teams remotely is Slack.
Microsoft Teams is also an efficient option. Around 65%
of all organizations
use
Slack
while 59% use Teams.

The primary advantage of these tools is that you can create multiple
groups and channels. You can have groups for the entire company, your
team, or merely a set of people. Hence, you can effectively converse
with fellow employees seamlessly.

3. Project Management

In a corporate setup, project management software is required to track
employees’ progress toward their individual goals. Additionally, the
project’s goals also need to be tracked by project managers and that of
the firm as a whole by the senior management.

Several commercial and
open-source project management software
allows all employees of a firm to access their immediate and long-term
goals. These tools work hierarchically, in which a project manager will
have access to all team members’ goals and activities, and managers will
be able to track the progress of their direct reports.

Employees will also be able to track the goals they have set for
themselves and the goals that managers have set for them.

The main platforms that provide such services are Asana and Trello. These platforms have a dashboard-based system which makes the
visualization of goal progress intuitive and simple. Additionally, you
can also converse with your employees and add events to your calendar
through these tools.

4. File Storage

In any organization with a workforce over a certain threshold, file
storage and data management can become tedious. With every employee
generating significant amounts of data, organizations generally need to
subscribe to enterprise-level storage plans so that employees do not
have to store data locally.

However, multiple considerations need to be made when you are choosing
a cloud storage provider. Depending on the industry you are working in,
security might be a major factor in your choice. You might want to
consider storing your data in local servers with security in mind.

Another major consideration could be the synchronization and automatic
update of files. The servers of your cloud storage service must also be
robust enough to handle multiple connections concurrently.

Dropbox has been one of the market leaders in the cloud storage domain
for more than a decade. While Dropbox is also a part of the Microsoft
portfolio, Microsoft also offers unlimited OneDrive storage with all of
its enterprise plans.

5. Video Conferencing

The primary sector that underwent a boom as a result of remote work was
video conferencing software. This software is used not just at the
organizational level but also at the personal and domestic level. It is
hence important that accounts for domestic and personal use be
separate.

Another requirement that many companies have of video conferencing
software is that the conferences must be end-to-end encrypted. Many
software also places a cap on the number of attendees present
concurrently, which can be a challenge when hosting large conferences.
Teams might also want the capability to send text messages and media on
the video conferencing software itself.

The two main software that has been used during the pandemic are Zoom
and Microsoft Teams. Zoom is a standalone video conferencing software
that does not have any other capabilities. On the other hand, Microsoft
Teams is a comprehensive suite that includes video conferencing
capabilities and storing files via SharePoint and communicating with
other team members.

6. Time Tracking Software

While most companies chose to let their employees work freely from home
during the pandemic and are not required to monitor their work time as
long as goals are achieved. However, several industries need to report
each of their employees’ exact work times. It is especially true in the
case of industries where a third party is involved.

For companies that work in these industries, time tracking software can
be of immense use. By utilizing this software, companies can monitor the
exact amount of time that their employees work while at home.

Different software uses different methods to track the work time of
employees. While some software use computer vision to track the
employee’s presence through the laptop camera, others use the cursor’s
movement as a metric. Among the most popular time tracking software is
Time Doctor, which also equips employees with the ability to edit their
tasks.

7. Password Management

While at the office, your laptop would probably connect to the office
Wi-Fi network. This means that passwords are not needed to gain access
to company data. However, while at home, multiple passwords have become
a necessity.

Password management software encrypts user passwords and adds a new
layer of security to this data. Tools such as LastPass are in use
worldwide to improve the security infrastructure of companies.