Years ago, remote working was considered as a customer service position at below minimum wage, but with the trends changing, it is becoming a full-time career. Technology is making us capable of getting the same job done wherever we are in the world. People all over the world are trying to adapt to this technology. Businesses are trying to get into this to keep up with the changing need of their employees and to adapt to talent from parts of the world.
How To Manage Remote Teams
Managing remote teams is becoming the need of the hour. As a project manager, it becomes your responsibility to set up the path for your teams success.
The growing trend in remote working
Here are the main reasons why remote working is growing in trend.
- Setting your own working schedule
- The comfort of being at home
- Chance to travel more
- Less stress
- Better time management for personal life
- More satisfying
There are many advantages of getting your business into remote working but you will have to explore the best practices for remote team management. Let’s have a look at the remote team tools that will simplify the process to manage remote workers keeping them productive and growing professionally.
Table of Contents
- Top 32 Remote Work Tools for Remote Teams
- Best Call Center Software
- Best Business Phone Solution
- Best Quick Feedback Tool
- Best Time Management Tool
- Best Video Calls and Screen Sharing Tool
- Best Work-life Balance Tool
- Best Note-Taking App
- Best Employee Rewards Tool
- Best Accountability and Reporting Tool
- Best Help Desk Tool
- Best Time Converter Tool
Top 32 Remote Work Tools for Remote Teams
Best Project management Tool
Some teams might try to handle everything via emails which is particularly dangerous. Project management system solve the problem of virtual teams to help organize documents and tasks, to make it easier for the teams.
1. ProofHub
ProofHub is an online project management software that is trusted by hundreds of remote teams to bring everything at one place. Team members can have seamless interactions with fellow teammates and clients. ProofHub comes with a plenty of features such as online proofing, discussions, chat to share feedback and remote project management only at a central place. ProofHub being an all-in-one remote project management software is a must-have for teams that demand a greater level of management proficiency.
Organize your remote team to get more work done. Use ProofHub.
Read On: Benefits of Project Management Software
2. Nuclino
Nuclino was inspired by the idea of a collective brain. It’s a unified workspace where remote teams can bring all their knowledge, docs, and projects together in one place, replacing multiple other remote work tools. You can use Nuclino to build your company wiki, manage projects and tasks, share and work on documents in real time, onboard new remote employees, and more – all without the chaos of files and folders, context switching, or silos. The List, Board, and Graph views help you organize your docs and projects in a way that best fits your workflow.
Nuclino stands out thanks to its uncluttered, clean interface, user-friendly design, and speed. It has everything you need to get things done, without clunky menus or rarely-used features to distract you. This makes Nuclino a great choice for those who value ease of use and speed over feature count.
Nuclino has virtually no learning curve and makes it really easy for new users to get started.
3. Basecamp
Basecamp is a popular choice among managers, teams, freelancers, and agencies for its simple functionality, clean design, and elegant usability. It’s a project management and team collaboration software solution that helps you manage projects and communicate with clients in a meaningful way.
It offers a range of features and tools for sharing ideas, organizing conversations, and keeping everyone on the same page throughout the project.
At the same time, you get to experience limitations like no time tracking, no ability to archive topics, no subtasks, no professional team hierarchy, only outside integrations, etc. These limitations are the very reason why organizations and teams (especially growing teams) are looking for the best alternatives to Basecamp.
Well, no tool is perfect. At the end of the day, it is your specific needs that will decide whether or not a tool is ideal for your business. So, if Basecamp seems like a fair choice to you, give it a try.
4. Instagantt
Instagantt is a powerful project management software that helps you visually plan, control, and schedule your projects. It’s a lot more than just a Gantt chart creator. When giving it a try, you’ll quickly notice you’re working with a super intuitive and beautifully built software that allows you to develop an accurate illustration of your projects.
Communication is also a huge part of Instagantt. This software allows you to streamline your entire workflow and collaborate with your team members, making it a perfect fit for remote working, too. Instagantt also comes with plenty of useful features such as the ability to create tasks and subtasks, templates for different types of projects, guidelines, milestones, notifications, baselines, critical path, and automatic project scheduling, all of which promote the feeling of being 100% sure of what’s going on with your projects at all times.
There are many advantages to using Instagantt, but definitely one of the most important ones is being able to track meaningful details such as information related to deadlines, risks, priorities, and estimated hours and costs. It’s also perfect for managing different types of projects, clients, and teams, or even for being able to keep track of how each individual person is managing their workload. It’s definitely a good idea to give Instagantt a try.
Email Marketing Tools with Analytics
5. EmailAnalytics
EmailAnalytics is a productivity tool that visualizes your team’s email activity. You can see each member of your team’s average email response time, as well as how many emails each member of your team sends and receives every day. Sales and customer service teams use it to monitor and improve email productivity, and EmailAnalytics users see an average of a 42.5% improvement in email response time. That increased speed leads to a 16% increase in sales, on average.
To make things super convenient for team managers, you can get daily, weekly, and monthly email reports with benchmark data to compare your team against other teams, and watch your team’s improvement over time.
If your remote team uses email (and who doesn’t?) then your team needs EmailAnalytics. There’s no software to install, setup is done in just a few clicks, and you can instantly add team members and start tracking their email activity. It’s a must-have tool for any remote team.
Best Team Collaboration Tool
With the rise in distributed companies, working with teams across borders is becoming a norm. Communication issues are bound to occur when the teams are not together in a room.
6. Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger is a compact remote work tool for small, medium, and large enterprises. This high functionality, low-complexity tool addresses various domain specificities. Team members can interact via instant messaging, audio and video calling, location and file sharing, and by creating unlimited groups on the go.
This Slack alternative allows admins to add vendors, suppliers, and freelancers as orange members who get restricted access to the workspace. Troop Messenger can be integrated with essential apps like Dropbox and Google Drive. With Troop Messenger, your team can migrate their files, documents, and do a lot more than texting. It is the best work from home communication tools your team needs to ensure business continuity during COVID-19.
7. Bit.ai
Bit.ai, the next-gen document management and collaboration platform is one of the most effective ways to collaborate across teams. Bit’s smart documents help you weave together digital rich content into collaborative documents. Enhance your communication and knowledge sharing across your team by attaching files, adding code blocks, and displaying rich media like Google Sheets, Typeform surveys, Airtable databases, Figma designs, and much more across 100+ applications into your documents.
The best part is that you can do all of this and more while collaborating in real-time. Bit is one of the smartest ways for your team to collaborate on internal communication, project documentation, technical docs, processes, training manuals, internal knowledge bases, client-facing content, on a company blog and much more.
A bonus feature is that your team can even collaborate with guests on documents and create workspace data rooms. This is really useful functionality if your workflows require you to collaborate with those outside of your organization like clients, consultants, vendors, etc.
Don’t waste a minute and start creating, sharing, organizing, managing, and tracking all of your team’s knowledge in one place with Bit.ai.
Read On: Importance Of Collaboration In The Workplace
8. Slack
Slack is a messaging remote work tool that everybody loves. A digital space that helps in communication among teammates, allow them to share ideas, share comment in real time so everything moves swiftly. You can have all your team communication in one place wherever you go with a remote collaboration tool. When the teams are remote, they can use Slack channels for instant messaging and collaboration. It will bring all your team communication in one place making managing remote employees a lot easy. Slack offers fully native apps for iOS and Android to give you complete functionality.
Also Read: 26 Best Slack Alternatives for Team Communication (You Cannot Live Without)
9. Hypercontext
Best Cloud Storage Service
Cloud storage is a perfect-sharing tool especially for remote Cloud Storage & Collaboration, documents and multimedia files are too large to send by email.
10. Google Drive
Google Drive is a cloud storage platform to keep all your files in one secure and centralized location. The remote workers can store and share documents, spreadsheets, and slide presentations. It can be used for reporting on weekly metrics. Additionally, Google Drive files can be synced across devices, so the individuals can view and update them from anywhere.
11. Dropbox
It doesn’t work so well to share large files over email, therefore, Dropbox is a modern workspace that offers various features for managing remote employees. Remote workers can easily sync, share and collaborate on documents. This cloud storage system has API that makes is useful for remote collaborators. It allows for sharing big files – powerpoint, photoshop, sketch with anyone.
Also Read:17 Best Alternatives To Dropbox You Need To About In 2023!
Best Productivity Tool
Remote productivity is a crucial part of remote workers. Managing remote team workers greatly means to make sure everyone is as productive as they can be.
12. Krisp
Krisp is a noise cancelling app that helps remote professionals and teams be more productive. It removes background noise on both sides of the call, so you and your call participants can take important calls from anywhere. You can use it with any communication app (Zoom, Skype, Slack, and many others) and enjoy more productive remote meetings.
13. Todoist
Todoist is for you if you are looking for geeking out on the organization of tasks for your remote teams. It gives all the core features that include tasks, subtasks, lets you create projects, add notes and upload files, set reminders, flags and a productivity chart.
Read On: How to be More Productive at Work
14. Blink
Blink is a comprehensive app that empowers communication and enhances productivity for remote teams. It is designed to transform employee experience as a mobile responsive and unified communication platform.
Blink offers a range of features like calendar management, discussion boards, employee directory, and news feed, etc. – all in an effort to create a work-friendly digital environment that facilitates productivity and team cohesion above all else.
At the same time, it also offers tools to create micro-applications within the Blink platform. Through this, your business can create its own employee communication and collaboration solutions without the need for technical knowledge.
These micro-apps support absence management, automated timesheets, payment cards, network searches, and more. However, the biggest charm of these micro-apps is that they can be optimized for desktops, mobiles, and tablets.
Blink is the ultimate employee app for organizations that want to support their mobile teams and keep them informed even when they are on the move.
Best VoIP Service
15. CallHippo
CallHippo is a cloud-based virtual phone system designed to help teams stay in touch with each other and their customers from anywhere. It offers a simple user-interface with features like Power Dialer, mobile app, and detailed call reporting. CallHippo empowers sales and service teams, enabling them to communicate with customers, adding to their satisfaction.
This advance call center management software helps teams connect via phones and desktops and provides features such as contact management, autodailing, and predictive dialing to simplify your calling needs. It also offers seamless integration, advanced analytics, and 24*7 support that help boost growth.
Best Call Center Software
16. Dialpad
Dialpad is a unified communications platform that provides AI-powered contact center, calling, and video conferencing. With built-in Voice Intelligence, your team can now make smarter calls from any device, with features like call transcription, automated note-taking, plus integrations with G Suite, Salesforce, Zendesk, and more.
Dialpad Contact Center allows you to build an efficient call center to intelligently route calls and reduce customer wait times. Since everything is on the cloud, calls can be taken by your remote team from anywhere, instead of being tied to a traditional desk phone.
For customer service and sales teams, Dialpad helps them excel at what they do best — without worrying about taking notes or forgetting how to reply when a specific issue is mentioned during a call. Features like real-time sentiment analysis alerts managers when negative sentiment is detected so they can immediately provide in-call guidance to improve your customer experience. With Dialpad, you can quickly set up your inbound or outbound call center within minutes.
Best Business Phone Solution
17. CloudTalk
CloudTalk is one of the most popular cloud-based call center softwares, which allows your people to work from anywhere in the world. It offers more than 50 features to simplify the job for customer support and sales teams. Some of the most useful features are advanced IVR (Interactive Voice Response), predictive dialer, call forwarding, skills-based routing, or international numbers. All of those advantages help your team to provide the best service for your clients whilst improving employees performance at the same time.
Apart from the mentioned features, CloudTalk offers integration with many popular tools and CRMs, making it easier for companies to deliver first-class customer experiences and to achieve growth in overall business profitably. CloudTalk subscriptions start at $20/month (billed monthly). However, they also offer a free 14-day trial on any plan.
Best Quick Feedback Tool
When working with remote teams, remote feedback is equally important as collaboration. Getting feedback makes teams grow as professionals.
18. Chimp or Champ
A good manager should be inclined towards its teams’ happiness. Chimp or Champ allows managers to connect with their team in a simple and best way. It is an anonymous weekly employee happiness meter for checking the team. Improve employee well-being and achieve better results. You can go straightforward on purpose to get feedback.
Best Time Management Tool
When it comes to time management working with teams particularly becomes a challenge. Remote time management tools bring a better way to remote team management.
19. Kickidler
Kickidler is employee monitoring software of the next generation. It has a powerful set of tools that help increase the dedication of your team members.
Kickidler features include time tracking, employee productivity analysis, efficiency dynamics as well as an unlimited number of real-time screens and the option to record the history of actions on the computers.
In 2020, the software developers released an update called Autokick that helps make staff monitoring more democratic. The update includes automatic notifications and self-monitoring interface. Now the program will automatically notify workers that, for example, they’ve been reading the news for too long. It will also allow them to see their own productivity statistics.
20. Teamwork
Track every hour to boost your team’s productivity. The tool lets you invoice all tracked time and expenses. You can create custom time reports of time logged on the project. Export your report and time log entries as Excel, CSV, or PDF.
Further Reading: Teamwork Alternatives 2019: Best 16 Project Management Solutions
21. Hub staff
Hub staff will make you more productive and will make your time work for you. You can keep a track of where employees are spending their time and what tasks they are working on at a given time. Its eye-catchy features include online timesheets, employee scheduling, screen recording, employee monitoring, payroll software, GPS tracking, online invoicing, and project budgeting, and many more.
22. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a team time tracking application. It helps to keep track of how each individual person is keeping track of their time and hence makes them accountable for their working hours. You can even use alerting and other features to avoid distractions for extra productivity. It includes a desktop software, mobile version, and even a chrome app. It even offers a free 14-day trial without the need for a credit card.
Read On: Importance of Time Management in the Workplace
Best Video Calls and Screen Sharing Tool
When you’re not in the same room (working remotely) you need a tool to discuss visually with the teams.
23. Nextiva
Nextiva is a cloud phone system that empowers teams to communicate with customers and colleagues regardless of their location. The platform offers a host of features such as mobile app, call forwarding, call groups, website live chat, and more – designed to give your team the ability to connect with people on-the-go, from their office phone, smartphone, laptop, or tablet. See why Nextiva was just rated the best overall business phone service by the U.S. News and World Report. Get a free trial for your business.
24. Appear.in
Appear.in lets remote teams stay productive with easy video collaboration. Teams just have to create a room link, share the link by email or chat and that’s it. You are on the go to have a video discussion with your team.
Other features:
- No registration or downloads
- Group video conversations
- Simple screen sharing
- Join from any device
25. Zoom
Zoom is a group calling app with an amazing quality of the video. It is easy to use, most affordable and straightforward pricing. During remote Meetings & Video Chat, you can record any call with a full-length video. You can share your screen with teams for combined discussions. Other zoom solutions include video webinar, meetings, Zoom room, business IM, and voice sharing.
Best Work-life Balance Tool
The key to keeping the remote team productive is the work-life balance. Keeping a balance in both is important for personal health, relations and improving work performance.
26. Timezone.io
Many global remote employees are spread across different time zones. With a record of what time remote workers are around the world will help them manage their work and personal life.
27. 10to8
10to8 is scheduling software for remote teams that want to make appointments happen. 10to8 enables teams to arrange virtual staff meetings and online appointments with clients. What’s more, the native Zoom integration allows you to jump on video calls straight from your calendar. 10to8 can handle teams spread across multiple time zones and the 2-way calendar sync with most calendar apps ensures that double-bookings don’t happen. The automated reminders will help your team keep track of meetings and show up on time and so eliminate wasted time and confusion.
Read On: The Secret to Work-Life Balance
Best Note-Taking App
To make sure you get quality work done, note taking makes it a beautiful experience to take inspiration.
28. Evernote
Evernote is a great note taking solution for teammates working remotely. You can keep all your notes organized, sync it automatically across all your devices. Evernote is an application that serves as a notetaker, PDA, to-do list and pocket notebook.
Also Read: Evernote Alternatives: 12 Note-Taking Apps You Should Be Using Today
Best Employee Rewards Tool
Celebrate your team’s accomplishments.
29. WooBoard
Wooboard is an online platform that recognizes an employee for their good work. You can create reward programs for sending and receiving unlimited recognition. Employees can celebrate their success and initiate conversations through WooBoards social engagement features.
Best Accountability and Reporting Tool
Remote workers will feel part of the team when they are held accountable for their responsibilities. Having the right tools in place to keep teams accountable.
30. iDoneThis
iDoneThis is a place where managers can keep an eye on the big picture to know what is being done daily. The team members will have to just check in daily, in their browser or via email. They can add their robust reports and get along the project effectively. With remote workers across the world, this tool compensates the need for daily check-in meetings.
Best Help Desk Tool
31. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is a powerful multichannel help desk software that’s also rated as the #1 live chat software for SMB in 2020. It helps every business exceed customer expectations through personalized customer support. The software is packed with over 180 help desk features, including a ticketing system with a universal inbox, live chat, a built-in call center, integrations with social media, customer portals, and knowledge bases. Besides these features, it also gives you the opportunity to use gamification features, spam & fraud protection, detailed analytics, various filters, SLAs, and the option to use LiveAgent in 39 different languages.
The software automatically distributes incoming tickets to departments and agents, making it the perfect workflow automation tool. The advanced live chat feature enables you to chat with your customers in real-time, and also lets you see what are they typing on live chat before they hit send, so it gives you an opportunity to prepare your answers and exceed your customer’s expectations. LiveAgent allows you to talk to your customers over the phone, but also supports PC to PC calls via its call center. If your business has social media profiles, you’ll be able to monitor keywords, answer Tweets, and respond to comments and messages on Facebook and other social media networks right from your LiveAgent dashboard. Using this help desk software will improve your agent’s productivity and efficiency while increasing your customer’s satisfaction.
Best Time Converter Tool
Working with remote teams requires freedom of time and place to boost productivity. You need to find an easy way to communicate and collaborate while working across different time zones.
32. World Time Buddy
World Time Buddy is a remote work software with a time converter for distributed teams. It a convenient world clock and an online meeting scheduler. Its design lets people compare multiple time zones, plan conference calls, and web meetings for business.
With all these remote work tools in your pocket, it is likely that remote workers will stay productive and ensure employee happiness.
