Useful Free Tools to Manage Teams Work Remotely
If we’ve learned anything from the happenings of the past few weeks, it is the fact that remote working, in some cases, may not be an option but a necessity. With the coronavirus sweeping across cities, more companies are seeing the need to engage in social distancing, hence making it mandatory for employees to work from home.
There is a need to contain the spread of the virus, notwithstanding, there are several downsides to remote working. Generally, there is a reduction in revenue when people work from their homes. Shutting down facilities hurts businesses, and can lead to considerable losses in some cases. Another drawback to remote working is the possibility of rising inefficiency . So a lot of managers have come to realize that monitoring people closely increases the level of accountability and hence output. For companies that have teams of individuals working closely together on a project, as opposed to specific individuals working on assigned tasks, there are more problems.
I’ll be discussing the various applications that make it easy for you to keep tabs on your team members. The applications here range from those that help you effectively manage projects, to those that allow you to share screen time with others. Please do find below some of the tools, and how they are used to increase team productivity and efficiency even while working remotely.
#1 Tool Recommendation for Project Management – Asana
According to the official introduction, Asana is a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work. It has an impressive list of users, among which include Dropbox, Uber and Tesla.
The chief attraction for Asana is that a variety of users can make use of it. Whether you are an engineer, a graphic artist, a sales professional or HR manager, features of Asana can be tweaked to suit your needs. There are certain broad functions that Asana provides; However, there are specific features that could be activated to cater to your needs.
Another great feature of Asana is that it can be integrated with other services easily. It has a Google drive file that allows you to choose data from your device. You can also use it as an add-on to Chrome to improve ease of use.
With Asana, you will be able to assign tasks to specific team members and be able to measure and monitor the rate of compliance over time.
#2 Video and Audio Communication – Skype
Good old Skype has been around us for ages, and has managed to remain relevant even with the emergence of competing programs. It is estimated to have no less than 74 million users. The reason for its dominance is not far-fetched. It can be linked to its ability to evolve and incorporate new features with the passage of the years.
Skype provides video and audio call. Additionally, it gives room for group calls, document sharing, voice messages and screen sharing. There is no restriction concerning whether the number being called is a landline or a mobile line. Skype caters to a variety of needs, and all satisfactorily.
#3 Time Zone Management Tool – Figure It Out (FIO)
It is essential to have an app that manages time zones, especially when you have people working from different parts of the world, and different cities or states.
Figure It Out is specifically for individuals in different countries who work together. It stores the current time in each location and works to harmonize them. It also informs each person what time of day it is, whether morning or afternoon. It additionally lets you know the holidays in each country while grouping the states into different time zones. When you take all of these into consideration, it will help improve the effectiveness of each team member.
#4 Remote Data Sharing Software – AeroAdmin
AeroAdmin is an entirely portable remote desktop support client. It is especially designed for managers who want to have seamless integration of services between teams regardless of location. One other great feature of the application is that it offers unlimited connections to remote devices; Thus it has no cap on the number of people that can make use of it simultaneously. Besides, it offers parallel sessions and unattended access.
# Software for Increasing Personal Working Efficiency
The above mentioned applications are some recommendations for tools that can increase the team work efficiency and productivity, especially when working remotely. However, it is equally important to increase your working efficiency and productivity in daily individual work. For example, if you have a lot files and folders to manage, you must be confused by the poor efficiency of File Explorer. No tabs, slow search speed, no bookmarks for frequently used files, and so on.
The good thing is there are some file explorer alternatives that make various improvements on the Microsoft Windows explorer. The leading ones are ExplorerMax, Directory Opus, Explorer++, and so on. Have a try if interested.
Conclusion
In the world today, there is no excuse for inefficiency. Gone are the days when teams have to huddle together in a specific location to carry out tasks and beat deadlines. As stated earlier, the current state of affairs has made it inevitable that teams look for alternative means of ensuring supervision and achieving efficiency for group tasks. However, when the state of affairs normalizes, and everyone is back to the office, the effects and lessons learned from the use of these apps will still linger.
Author Bio
Cheryl Hearts is a writer and journalist from Boston, Massachusetts. Her passion for writing started at an early age and evolved during the high school years. She enjoyed creating her own stories, so she decided to make writing her career. After earning a degree in Journalism, Cheryl started running her own blog CherylHearts.com where she’s covering topics of great interest to society.