So much fuss around working from home or remote working tools among organizations! This outbreak is causing damage to the world in many ways, not only financially but personally too.
In this crisis, the remote working or work from home concept has gained much traction among the corporates. Due to the restrictions & precautionary measures, organizations have been implementing remote working strategies, which has led the businesses to a puzzle about how they can manage their work effectiveness & efficiency.
Companies are asking their staff whether they can work from home as they look to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and try to manage social distancing in office environments.
Remote work has been on the rise, and there’s research that makes it a very compelling proposition: one Stanford study found that employees who work from home work on an average of 9.5% longer than those who work in an office (a lot easier to do when you don’t have an hour-long commute), and are also 13% more productive.
But being a remote team comes up with lots of challenges and questions:
- How to optimize support coverage over the whole day?
- How can you manage to keep everyone productive and accountable?
- How do you replace the “office” culture while working from home?
- How to provide the best customer support to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks?
Well, digital innovation has changed the way we do business. “Without remote working, it could have been a lot worse,” says Steve Blitz, chief U.S. economist at the forecasting firm TS Lombard. The three clues to remote productivity are communication, task management, and focus.
Here is the list of remote working tools to boost productivity while working remotely
What’s the best way to ensure our products and services reach customers during this global pandemic? How can we stop traveling to visit clients? We have a few best collaborative tools to suggest that can improve your relationship with customers and boost productivity.
Manage Remote Customer Service/Experience:
1. Krisp
Krisp is a Windows PC noise suppression tool that removes background noise during calls. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, it creates a Deep Neural Network to acknowledge the voice of the person you are talking to on the microphone and removes the waveform of noise from the audio to offer a clearer audio experience.
The tool works bi-directionally, which means it removes the noise coming from other call participants, and they won't hear the noise coming from you.
2. Zapier
If you want to strike a special chord with the client, all-around easy client access with the use of Zapier integration makes the metrics readily accessible for active collaboration. Stuck with loads of repeatable processes, you should investigate whether Zapier could help you with process automation. Zapier makes moving information between applications as simple as point and click.
3. Zoom
Wondering about an easy way for remote meetings? Check out Zoom. As one of the market's most powerful webinar software, this interactive video conferencing tool manages to get your remote team together for a meeting. The tool allows Toll-free options in 60+ countries for joining meetings with built-in security
More than 10,000 academic institutions have chosen Zoom as they transfer their academic activities online.
4. Slack
Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield’s comments on Twitter about the changes his life and his company have been subjected to over this period of the pandemic.
Slack is the clear frontrunner in real-time team chat and instant messaging. The tool has been more suitable for startups and small companies. Teams can be created around departments, projects, and employees anywhere the user wants, and messages can be sent out to the teams over transom or DMS to individuals. Slack supports almost 1500 apps and tools, making the overall workflow smoother for all.
5. Sendible
Sendible is an email marketing software that is specifically designed for agencies with several clients. Sendible allows you to customize your dashboard according to your branding to attract new clients, monitor your brand, and track results. The tool provides automation for those who want to save time on repetitive tasks.
Sendible also takes care of content curation and helps to improve communication through collaboration when scheduling and approving content. Above that, it also demonstrates value to clients by providing advanced reporting through Google Analytics integration.
6. Intercom
Intercom is an online messaging & customer acquisition app that enables businesses to stay in touch with their customers and communications with website visitors. Working from home, it can monitor user interactions, track customers, and solve their queries.
However, Intercom boasts many useful features for teams that work from home, which include acquiring customers & engaging with them via email campaigns, push notifications, in-app mails, etc.
7. Trello
Trello, well known as the collaborative task management tool, is one of the best apps to manage projects. With a simple dashboard, the tool helps the user to assign, track and organize daily tasks and projects. Team Leaders and managers can assign and track their team progress, including completion date & time. One of the best tools for remote team management.
8. Salesforce
Salesforce, a leading CRM tool, effectively builds customer relations and gets to customers through insightful data. Empower your chatbots with AI to always be ready for support & servicing. The tool delivers a seamless customer experience even when your team works from home through different channels like website, email, social media, etc.
9. Every Time Zone
Real-time communication gets tough while managing a large team that’s spread across the globe. Every Time Zone makes things easier by checking out the time zones of fellow remote employees who are awake and available to talk. This way, you can easily redirect your efforts to someone closer to your time zone and discuss the issue with them instead.
10. Fluvid
Fluvid is a fully loaded online screen recording tool (with and without webcam recording) that works well in all operating systems. The screen recording tool is also the first to provide a Live streaming option and a feature to schedule a stream in advance.
Some of the other features include group sharing of videos, knowing who viewed your video feed, video scheduling and expiry, password protection on videos, annotation tools, a custom CTA button on the video player, and counting that ensures you are always connected with your team irrespective of your location.
The tool is available through the chrome extension and allows watermark-free screen recordings within and outside the chrome browser. Use it for product demos, meeting recordings and rundowns, team communication, code reviews, etc. Truly a new-age tool for the new normal of remote working. Launched in April 2020, Fluvid is being used by 150K+ users worldwide.
11. Microsoft
Microsoft Teams has already seen its use grow more than 40% in a week while announcing new features.
Being Google’s big competitor, Microsoft has been used by millions of enterprise consumers around the world. It perfectly integrates with any tools and coordinates meetings for team communications allowing group video and voice calling.
The company has recently removed background noise during video calls and added an offline mode to draft messages, making the tool more remote-friendly.
12. Skype
Pioneer in video call technology allows users to make high-quality video calls for free to team members on mobile devices and computers.
Skype has always been used by brands to conduct video conferences, meetings, interviews, and communications among people at different work locations. The tool helps to deliver conferences and keeps your communication alive and productive even when you are working remotely.
13. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is considered one of remote teams' best social media management tools. This tool provides a uniform solution to manage your different social media profiles like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., with ease of use & management.
Since people are staying at home, social media usage will eventually increase, and Hootsuite can manage your social media activities for all the online platforms. The web-based tool is compatible with all activities, starting with managing your content, generating analytics reports, and filtering social conversations that matter.
14. Buffer
Buffer is another famous one on our social media tools list. It helps to schedule content across different social channels through one dashboard. Pro-marketers share posts by adding a specific time to get better results and drive more social traffic to their blog. The free version is compatible with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
15. Revive Old Post
Want better exposure for branding on social media platforms, Revive Old Post is a great tool to promote older pieces in your content catalog. You can set a specific period between each post-share and specify the number of posts you would like to share with the tool.
The tool also allows custom scheduling to strategically target your audience while automatically sharing new and old content to promote on your site.
16. Canva
The tool designs great-looking content from your web browser. As social media is in hype currently, using well-designed graphic visuals is a great way to brand.
Canva is the best tool to manage visuals in social media for brand aesthetics. The free platform has a few basic elements, so you can design social images for your blog promotion or create templates for your marketing campaigns.
Manage Project Management Tools
17. Asana
Asana allows different teams to track projects and assign tasks & sub-tasks. There are dozens of ready-to-go templates available to manage projects within the tool. The USP of the software is the Rules function. You can create rules to assign the task to certain team members. The tool helps map the project chart for remote workforce teams.
18. Monday.com
Monday.com, the cloud-based project management platform, is aimed at small and mid-sized teams and uses labels to identify who is working on what and when clearly. The tool helps to organize and sort tasks for team members and makes it easier to track the project workflow for the user.
19. Proofhub
Proofhub makes task management less stressful for teams. The versatile project management software comes packed with powerful features to eliminate the need for too many different tools to run your business and saves a lot of time during the feedback-sharing process. It's also available as a mobile app for Android and iOS users.
20. Instagantt
Instagantt allows you to link schedules from other sources. Once the information is stored, it can be accessed across each of your different platforms. Managing and monitoring the team's workload gets much easier.
The tool allows various activities like setting up timelines, assigning tasks, assigning due dates, and evaluating progress. It even comes up with Public snapshot sharing options and diverse exporting options: Excel, image, and PDF.
21. Github
GitHub is a platform primarily designed for developers and technical teams to share, host, and review the code designed by them. Developers can ask for feedback on each other’s code and cooperate in their work. Github provides features like access control, bug tracking, and task management for every project.
22. Knowmax
Knowmax is an enterprise knowledge base software intended to organize information through the magnificent support implemented by Artificial Intelligence & Mixed Reality. It enables a centralized data repository for information management where businesses expand the quality of CX from a spectrum of content creation, curation, and diversified distribution across channels.
Empowering your workforce & increasing work-from-home productivity with a well-updated and extensive knowledge management system that helps in easy findability & actionability while resolving tickets.
23. Teamwork
Teamwork is a great all-in-one project management solution that is ideal for remote teams. It is designed to be “Powerful when you need it to be; this is because it is very powerful and feature-rich yet is also simple to use and boasts an intuitive user interface. That is why it is trusted by over 20,000 businesses and 6,000 agencies worldwide.
It allows you to manage multiple projects simultaneously and manage individual team member workloads for efficient and effective task management and distribution, it also has a useful time tracking feature, and its client permissions management feature is sure to be a big hit with agencies.
24. Scribe
Cut your training time in half and enable your remote teams to get the job done. Scribe is a knowledge-share tool that will automatically turn any process into a step-by-step guide, complete with written instructions and screenshots. It offers a browser extension and desktop app (on Pro and above), so there’s no limit to what you can share.
Simply click Record and conduct business as usual. Scribe will monitor your clicks and keystrokes to produce your how-to guide. Then, you can instantly share with any team member via a link, or embed the Scribe into your knowledge base. Now, everyone can be an expert in your processes or workflows.
25. Acquire
Acquire provides the best video call and screen sharing features with real-time communications. Acquire resonates with the use of cutting-edge technology to deliver excellent customer service at your fingertips without moving out of your comfort zone.
With the help of this ingenious tool, it is possible to meet various facets of modern-day businesses like customer service, sales, and support needs across multiple platforms and devices. Can it get any better than this?
Conclusion:
According to research by Pennsylvania State University, employees who work remotely are more productive and have a better work-life balance than those who do not. And 56% of businesses believe that remote working improves productivity.
Using these team collaboration and resource management tools it is likely to get smoother with practice, of course. In the meantime, many office-workers-turned-home-workers will eventually gain the confidence they’re still doing their jobs to continue receiving their paychecks.
FAQ
What is the remote working tool?
No matter where you are located, persons who work remotely can benefit from remote working software. Software for remote work can include messaging and communication tools like video chat, cloud storage, task and project management tools, team collaboration software, screen sharing tools, remote team management apps, etc.
What are the Pros and cons of remote working?
Pros: Higher productivity. Better work-life balance. Healthier lifestyle. More savings and lesser carbon footprint. Cons. Communication Gaps. Need help staying motivated. Lack of Social Interaction. Management challenges.
What equipment is required for remote work?
Depending on your work type, you might need a laptop, internet, headphones, and particular video conferencing and collaboration tools like Zoom, Slack, and Salesforce. You might also spend money on a second monitor, a desk, a chair, a laptop riser, a printer, etc., for a fully functional office at home.
What are the top work-from-home productivity tools?
Video calling: The best apps currently available for video calls and group meetings. To-do list apps: Manage your tasks for work and personal life. Time tracking: Apps for managers and individuals to keep track of time spent on each task. Doc sharing and collaboration: Create, share and collaborate on documents on the cloud. Screen sharing: Apps that make it easy to share your device screens with fellow team members. Remote access: Access and control other team members’ devices to provide technical support and complete tasks on their behalf.
