Top Management and Productivity Tools for Remote Teams

With remote working being a norm, most companies are looking for the right tools for connecting their many employees across different time zones. Remote working has lots of advantages, and with the right tools, you can get the most out of your staff. Plus, the fact that you can get the best talent across the globe is a bonus.

Unfortunately, with the many remote working tools available, creating the best tech stack can be quite challenging. In this guide, we’ll share various tools/apps that can help you optimize productivity, collaboration, and communication.

Internal Communication Tools

Emails can work in the traditional work environment since you can meet and talk to your team physically. However, with remote working, you need tools that can streamline data sharing while creating a virtual office environment. Fortunately, the following tools can help you arrange projects while integrating perfectly with other popular work tools.

Slack

Other than helping you communicate with your team, this instant messaging app(Slack) lets you organize your conversation by projects, team and topics. You can even create some customized channels for different projects, where you can conduct private chats with the right team. Your team can share files and easily search through shared data, files and conversations. This tool integrates with other apps including Trello, Zoom, and Google Drive while offering instant notification features. It also comes with a mobile app that you can always use on the go; plus, if you’re looking for a simpler writing environment, here’s how to uninstall Grammarly extension.

Notion

Like Slack, Notion offers a single platform where you can manage projects, capture thoughts, and even manage your firm. With this App, you can create a centralized portal for all your company’s guidelines, FAQs, knowledge, and staff handbooks.

Your teams can create various customized databases for sharing and organizing company information from production specifications and sales leads. It is easy to control, plus you can offer editing rights to various users based on their role in the company.

Loom

Unlike Zoom, loom merges screen recording with video calls. Your team leader can walk other employees through challenging topics. You can share this App via a link directly on platforms like Slack. This tool lets you track comments, reactions, and views to gauge the impact of their messages.

Vowel

Anyone who loves keeping transcripts of their meetings should opt for vowels instead of the other video chatting apps. This App produces AI-powered transcripts and summaries for all your virtual meetings. You can revisit them and see if you missed any point, you can even share the transcripts with other team members who missed the meeting.

Your team can use screen sharing, timers, emojis, and agendas to make their meeting engaging. You can also skip to a certain point in the meeting instead of listening to the entire meeting, thanks to the text-search feature.

Productivity and Task Management Apps

You can keep track of all your projects while increasing the teams’ focus and productivity using these tools. With the best task management tool, you can split tasks into milestones and even follow up on deadlines.

Asana

Unlike most apps, Asana promotes transparency and accountability between your remote employees. This App helps you create and manage various projects with clear deadlines, milestones, goals, and even assign tasks. You can choose from many views like calendars, boards and lists to customize your projects.

This tool enhances collaboration via automated workflow, project execution and comments while integrating with other tools. Their free plans can support a team of 10 people and an individual; plus, it comes with over 100 integrations.

Harvest

Like most time-tracking apps, this tool lets employees start/stop timer on mobile apps, desktop apps and web apps. You can track your team’s working hours and even see them on their reports. For timely payments and clear communication, you can share the time reports even with the client.

Todoist

You can use the Todoist to create your daily or weekly to-do list. This App lets your remote staff capture tasks, before splitting them into various subtasks. They can even set up recurring jobs with flexible weekly or daily intervals. You can assign priorities to the available tasks, ensuring that the crucial ones are done first.

Collaborating Tools

These tools help your team share work documents with others while keeping track of them. They can even update these documents while leaving them accessible to other people from different time zones.   

Google Drive

This free to use feature offers people over 15gb of free space for storing their details including videos and documents. Google Drive is intuitive and easy to use, so anyone can manage their files in this virtual space. Plus, you can share your files with other team members via link or email and even collaborate on various presentations, spreadsheets and documents.

Miro

This whiteboard tool offers users an infinite canvas for idea visualization and brainstorming. It’s ideal for a team that requires unrestricted collaboration. Basically, anyone in your team can use the same canvas simultaneously. You can pick the right template from their pre-made templates ideal for various tasks. Miro has pre-made templates for user flows, Kanban boards, and mind mapping.    

OneDrive

Owned by Microsoft, this cloud storage service offers you a convenient and secure way to access, share and store files. OneDrive integrates with various Microsoft Office apps like spreadsheets, presentations and documents. You can sync your files on various devices, while ensuring your team has access to the latest updates.

It also features video and photo backups from your smartphone, which makes it a perfect option for storing memories. To keep your information private, it comes with robust security measures like file-encryptions. This gives users peace of mind and control over your data.

Dropbox

Our list of collaborative apps would be incomplete if we don’t mention Dropbox. This file sharing tool has an intuitive interface and can be accessed on a wide range of devices. Dropbox is the best option for companies sharing huge files, particularly multimedia files. You can share these files by direct invitations, public sharing, and password-protected links.

This App lets you access your files without the internet. Thanks to its block-syncing features, you can update the files and your team can see the changes immediately. This makes it the best option for a remote team to collaborate on a single project.

International Hiring Apps

These hiring tools help companies overcome geographical barriers while ensuring a seamless hiring process. Basically, these apps can help you perform background checks and even help you with the interviewing and selection process.

Veremark

Apps like Triton Canada can help you do background checks on Canadian remote employees, but for global checks, you can try Veremark. This tool lets you do a background check for staff from over 150 nations. You can validate your remote employee’s social media profile, identity, and fitness. Employers can even confirm if a person has the right documents to work in a given nation. Veremark offers a regional support team that has complied with the local laws.

Greenhouse

For publishing your job ads on various platforms, you can use Greenhouse. Greenhouse publishes your job ads on various job boards across the globe and even on social media platforms. This ATS software offers you a scorecard for evaluating applicants based on their criteria while identifying the best person for the role.

Greenhouse can easily integrate with other onboarding platforms like Remote HRIS. This lets you link your onboarding and recruiting platforms with other Global HR platforms.

Endnote

The increased popularity of remote teams has redefined how employees collaborate and operate. Companies can now outsource talent from any corner of the globe and work with them seamlessly. They can use Veremark for background checks after applicants respond to the ads they published using Greenhouse. After the hiring process, you can communicate with them using Slack and Notion while managing their projects using Asana. These tools allow teams to function seamlessly, irrespective of their time zones. On top of that Harvest can ensure everyone is paid as per their total working hours.