3 Tools You Need to Manage Your Remote Team

Remote working was considered an absurd idea back then which is quite popular in modern days. With remote working, it is not feasible to manage the entire business effectively even without being in the office space.

Technological tools made it easier for businesses and individuals to be productive and leverage the benefits of remote working. Companies are finding it more convenient to hire a virtual team for the projects.

Employees can balance their personal and professional life very smoothly while working remotely. With such convenience, employees have higher morale and loyalty towards the company that allows them to work resiliently from anywhere.

Also, businesses can hire excellent and skilled minds from around the world to handle different tasks or projects. Remote working results in cost-cutting and improved productivity of employees.

Benefits of Remote Working:

Remote working carries a lot of benefits for both businesses and employees in many ways. Such as:

• Companies can save on expenses like electricity, work space management, employee necessities, etc
• There is no need to pay for huge office space as most of the employees will work remotely
• Companies can hire skilled professionals from any location in the world, so there’s always someone online to handle the project and manage customers
• If a company runs seasonal marketing campaigns and requires a workforce during the holiday season, it can be managed easily
• Employees can enjoy a balanced work and personal life. They can stay with their family and kids and work at the same time

Although many direct benefits, remote working offers some management difficulties as well. Something it can get quite challenging cooperating with and manage the scattered workforce.

Tools like email, video conferencing, screen sharing, and instant messaging, allow people to work together even after being at great distances from the office and each other. Still, managing the widely-scattered workforce with traditional management techniques is rarely successful.

To ensure the success of a remote working environment, each team member has to collaborate, communicate and have a reliable way of sharing ideas among themselves.

Here is the list of 3 key tools that every business must acquire in order to successfully manage their remote workers.

• Microsoft Teams

In any case, communication software is required for smooth communication between employees and effective management. Although there are many communication channels such as email, they are not effective with remote when instant responses are needed.

It is wearisome and hard to track the email conversation and allows employees to submit feedback. If you are managing a remote team, it is important to have a direct communication platform.

Today, there are platforms available that resemble social media in terms of engagement and ease-of-use. One of the best among all is Microsoft Teams which allows making team-level and company-wide communication channels.

Microsoft developed an excellent communication platform Microsoft Teams to keep employees connected while they work apart. Teams software allows you to talk, meet, call, and collaborate all in one place.

It also enables individual peer-to-peer messaging. Individuals can share files, make to-do lists, and use features that support work-related communication.

• Phabricator Project Management

While managing a remote team, a project manager goes through a lot of difficulties. When the whole project team is working from different locations, it is vital that all the tasks and project details are managed effectively in one place.

Phabricator does this for you. Alphred is a Phabricator mobile app that allows you to manage your project with a smartphone in hand.

Phabricator is a complete suite of web-based software development collaboration tools. It is used by organizations like Asana, Facebook, Uber, and Quora.

Many businesses including us, also use Phabricator for project management. While Phabricator is complete web software for project management, it was lacking mobile apps to manage projects on the go. Seeing the gap, we decided to build the very first native mobile app for Phabricator - Alphred.

Some salient features of Alphred:

1. Connects to *any* Phabricator instance which has Conduit API active.

2. Automagically gets Conduit API token (just enter your username/password in the Phabricator login page, running in a web-view)

3. Uses Conduit API to get projects and tasks

4. Offline (currently read-only) access to all projects and tasks

5. Powerful search with lots of parameters for filtering tasks

• Google Suite

For any company having remote workers, tracking the work progress is really important. G Suite is one of the simplest platforms for managing a remote workforce. It allows workers in several time zones to work on projects asynchronously.

Use G Suite to enhance communication, collaborate on ideas and projects, share information and documents, streamline processes, and increase your team’s productivity.

The global scheduling features, instant updates, and synchronization and sharing of knowledge allow everyone to access documents and collaborate as if they were within the same office and zone. The simplest part is that everything, including individual access and permissions, is often managed via the administrator panel.

G-suite combines the following tools:

• Communication Platform: Hangout
• Document Sharing or Collaboration: Google Drive
• Google Form
• Google Docs
• And many more

Today, both businesses and workers are embracing remote working because it supports flexibility and productivity.

To make remote work effective in your business, it’s important to use the proper tools and platforms. You’ll enable your employees to coordinate their tasks and carry them out successfully.

As you improve your remote work operations and processes, you won’t just grow your business, you’ll also build a more loyal workforce.