5 Best Tech Tools for Remote Teams

The pandemic caused by Covid-19 has given a 360 degrees shift to businesses and their employees. The concept of remote working was daunting. Organizations were reluctant to hire remote employees. There was a fear that employees will be distracted from their duties if they work from home. 

A general perception was that the relationship between managers and employees might suffer a lot in remote work. But thanks to advancements in technology that gave a long list of tech tools for remote teams. In this regard, here’s a famous quote by Micheal Dell:

Working from home has a lot more benefits than working from a physical location if it’s managed properly. Technology has made collaborations easy across the continents.  Besides, remote work allows you to grow in different markets and work with diverse minds. 

Now, companies are offering more and more home-based jobs, whereas employees are becoming more and more productive. Employees are 24/7 connected to one another. Various communication tools help managers and their subordinates to communicate with each other. 

Also, there are so many collaboration tools as well, which make collaborations easier and employees more productive. This article enlists five best tech tools for remote teams or distributed teams. So, it will help you all to manage your distributed teams efficiently.

The article covers the features and benefits of GSuite, Serene, Slack, Trello, and Jibble. We will dig deep into each of them one by one.

GSuite- One of the Best Tools for Remote Teams:

Google provides a wide range of products for businesses to grow. It provides various productivity products from creating and connecting to accessing and controlling. No matter where your team is located, GSuite products will help you to streamline your work and collaborate easily. 

Let us see one by one all the products of GSuite:

Products to Connect Remote Teams

Google provides Gmail for emails, Google Meets for video conferencing, and Calendar for collaboration. Its other connecting products include Google Meets Hardware, Currents, and Google Chat. In this way, Google is connecting remote teams through these tech tools.

Create with GSuite

You must have used Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Slides. Along with these Create tools for remote teams, GSuite also provides Google Sites, App Script, Keep, and Jamboard. With all these tools, remote teams can collaborate to create documents, presentation slides, sheets, websites, practice script, and much more.

GSuite Tools to Access

Almost every one of us has used Google Drive. It provides us Cloud Storage and Collaboration without any lag for free. Such a flexible tool Google has provided us for collaboration!

GSuite has another Access tool as well. It is Google Cloud search that lets you do powerful searches instantly.

Control Tools by GSuite

These tools include Admin, Vault, End Point, and Work Insights. With these tools, you can easily and efficiently manage your remote teams. You can have a check and balance on them and can achieve data security as well.

Serene

Serene is a powerful tool to save your remote workers from distractions. When a person is working from home or is working remotely, he might be distracted by his family. Other distractions include social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc, and multitasking as well. 

This is where Serene comes in!

Serene helps an individual to focus on a single task per day. It avoids multitasking saying in its tagline:

Features and Benefits of Serene

Serene has the following features to increase the productivity of remote teams:

• Day Planner: Plan your day by setting one goal per day.
• To-do List: Manage your tasks efficiently by assigning relevant tasks to the right team member.
• Phone Silencer: Keep you away from extra calls and other stuff on the phone.
• App and Website Blocker: Block apps and websites that divert your attention from the work to fun things. These may include social apps and sites, news sites, games, etc.
• Distraction-Free Sessions: Have regular sessions with breaks so that the team does not go lazy and out of productivity.
• Background Music: Soft background music to keep you attentive and focused on the work.

Slack

There was a time when organizations and their employees used emails to contact each other. The time has changed now!

Employees want instant and easy communication now and Slack is the best communication tool for this!

Slack is an instant messaging tool that connects distributed teams by breaking the barrier of distances. Employees can join channels that belong to them and may leave them if they don’t require it anymore. Everybody receives messages relevant to them. It helps to share files, audio & video conferencing, and much more.

Tools for Remote Teams: Slack Features

Let us see what features Slack provides us:

• Message Instantly: Instantly message your teammates and collaborate easily. 
• Share Files: Share almost every type of file with your remote team with almost no effort.
• Create Threads: You can create threads to keep your main conversation away from your chats.
• Set Status: Set your availability status as per your working hours.
• Voice & Video Calls and Screen Sharing: Call your teammates either through voice or through video seamlessly from within Slack. You can share your screen as well during these calls.

Trello

Trello is a project management tool. There are too many project management tools available online but Trello is the most famous tool. The reason behind this popularity is its ease of use and efficiency. You can assign tasks to your employees with deadlines and labels.

Features of Trello

Here are some important features of Trello that are easy to use and keep your project managed:

• Create Lists: You can create a list of related tasks in Trello. These lists will allow you to organize tasks of a particular category under the same head. In these lists, you can create several cards of related tasks.
• Assign Tasks: Assign the relevant task to the relevant employee.
• Share Files: Share files of any type on Trello cards.
• Track Activities: Track the activities of your employees by viewing activities on the card assigned to a particular employee. You receive notifications as well if any operation is performed on the card.
• Assign Due Dates & Labels: Assign due dates to complete a particular task. Set priority of the task by setting labels on the card.
• Share Feedback in Comments: Trello allows teammates to collaborate and share their feedback in the comments.

Jibble

Jibble is a time tracking app that allows you to track your remote employees. By tracking their activities, the employer can see on which project a particular employee is spending time. 

It has various features like creating reports and showing stats, facial recognition, etc. Let’s have a deep look at its features in the next section!

Unique Functionalities by Jibble

Jibble has the following main features:

• Work Schedules: Schedule working time for your remote teams and define overtime and break counts.
• Time Sheets & Reports: Provides you with daily, weekly, and monthly timesheets. This helps to calculate payroll and related matters.
• Geo-Location: Track from your employees are clocking in and out from their mobile phones.
• Track Activities: Helps you to see how much time is used against a particular project by an employee.
• Facial Recognition: For attendance, verify your employees by facial recognition.
• Stats & Alerts: See daily, weekly, and monthly statistics. Notify your employees about their weekly and monthly timesheets.

Tech Tools for Remote Teams: Summary

Here is a one-liner summary for all of the above-mentioned tools:

Conclusion

We have seen five famous and almost free tech tools for remote teams. However, there are so many other tools as well. Like Zoom for video conferencing, Doodle and Confluence, etc. 

Organizations can choose any of the tools as per their organizational structure. If the organizational structure requires to use all these, they can go for all of them as well.

But there is a gentle Reminder! Start using these tech tools with their free versions and upgrade packages if required.

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Sources: Venture Harbour, Forbes, 15Five