The 6 Best Tools for Remote Businesses

According to the estimates published by the Global Workplace Analytics, nearly a third of the entire workforce (25-30%) will be working from home several days a week by the end of the next year. The chances are that you’re reading this blog while taking a break from work and sitting cozy in your living room.

Now, working remotely implies that there’s a physical distance between you and your coworkers. So, you’ll have to rely on online channels to keep in touch with your colleagues and tackle work issues. That’s why it’s vital you choose the best tools for remote business.

Here’s our list of 6 apps that will make telecommuting more convenient for you, no matter if you’re a remote team manager or an employee.

Clockify - for time tracking

To ensure that their remote employees are handling tasks and meeting deadlines, companies can request employee time tracking. That way, employers can find out how much time workers spend on particular tasks and whether they’re overwhelmed.

Clockify is a time tracking app that lets you log in your work hours, either by:

• Turning on a timer when you start working and turning it off at the end of the day,
• adding your hours manually, or
• adding time in the timesheet.

By logging your time daily and adding a description for every task, you’ll have a weekly overview of your assignments. Thus, you’ll know what tasks demand more time. Besides, Clockify allows you to mark your hours as billable and non-billable.

Moreover, managers can watch the progress of any project and keep an eye on the project budget.

Slack - for team messaging

This tool allows you to reach out to your colleagues whenever you need their help or just want to chat. These are the major features of Slack:

• Instant messages: you can either send private messages or make a group chat for your team.
• Channels: you can create channels that have one topic in focus.
• Statuses: you can add a status when you need to inform your colleagues about an important matter. For instance, when you don’t want to be disturbed because you need to focus on an urgent task.

Aside from these features, you can use Slack to send files to your coworkers.

UberConference - for video conferencing

Apart from chatting, video calls are a vital part of communication within remote teams. With UberConference, you can join video meetings without having to download the app or use additional PINs.

Here are other valuable features:

• Sharing the screen during the calls.
• Voice intelligence: this tool can capture significant moments of your meetings. Then, you’ll get a list of Action items from the call, so you can review them later.
• Custom hold music: you can make hold music more fun by selecting your own songs.

Another useful option is that, when someone’s speaking during the meeting, their feed will be highlighted.

Monday - for project management

When teleworking, you need a reliable tool for managing your projects remotely. Monday is an app that helps you take care of projects, assign tasks and deadlines to the team members, all in one workspace.

These are the main options of this tool:

• A board where you can organise your projects and tasks.
• Automation: for instance, whenever there’s a status change on the task, the app can automatically add particular team members to the task. That way, nobody misses any important updates.
• Integrations: to have a more practical workflow, you can also connect the tools you usually use with Monday.

Besides, if your remote team members are located around the globe, be sure to create a board for the entire team, along with their locations. By doing so, you’ll be able to see local time for each location and each employee.

Confluence - for file management

This app lets you gather all important documents, notes, and files in one place.

Here are the major features of Confluence:

• Templates: there are over 75 custom templates you can use to create reports, planning documents, or project strategies.
• Social intranet: this feature is extremely useful for remote teams. The company’s management can keep significant documents in Confluence and share them with all employees. For instance, if the company requires following any specific rules, these documents should be available to all workers.

Much like Monday, Confluence lets you create integrations with other apps.

Timezone.io - for time zone management

Being part of a remote team sometimes entails working with colleagues around the globe. That is why we highly recommend using an app for managing various time zones, such as Timezone.io.

These are the best components of this tool:

• Dashboard: once you’ve added all team members and their locations, the dashboard will show you particular locations, all your colleagues who live at those locations, and their local time. Having this overview helps you find suitable times of day for setting team meetings.
• Transparency: by looking at these time zones, you can see which employees are available at the moment. So, if anything urgent happens, you’ll be able to reach out to these colleagues.

Thus, the time difference won’t be an issue anymore.

In conclusion

Working remotely requires a diverse set of rules than working on-site. But, if you incorporate these tools into your daily routine, you’ll be able to communicate and collaborate with your colleagues with ease. Moreover, you’ll keep track of your assignments and manage your workload better. You’ll soon realise that, with a little help from these apps, your performance can thrive when telecommuting.

Author bio:

Ivana Fisic is a time management researcher and writer. She is always exploring the new methods of how time management can help you organise your workflow more effectively, as well as how you can increase your productivity.

Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels