This year, plenty of employees have moved their workstations home. It was challenging to reorganize our lives and switch entirely to working from a distance, like with webinars. However, we are starting to see more and more advantages of the new workflow. But how to make the most of remote working?
New situations affect the job market directly and require us to reshape our working habits. That's where special tools come in handy to support the implementation of these changes and to assist us with accomplishing our daily tasks. In this article, you will find out how to be more effective and conquer the business world without leaving your home office.
Let's talk about the best remote work tools that can make achieving your business goals a piece of cake.
Advantages of remote working
We are more productive!
Research shows that 65% of respondents are more productive at home than in their usual workplace. Why? Because we tend to be more flexible and the home environment seems much more friendly for us. We don't have to waste time on commuting to work or getting annoyed when standing in traffic jams. However, the distance can be noticeable when your team has to discuss upcoming projects e.g. via enterprise project management software or in your headless CMS. Although they won't be able to gather in one place face to face, you can create a special meeting room online. Such conversations are able to replace all real-life meetings, no matter if you need to organize a one-on-one appointment or a conference with all employees. To make this experience more lifelike, remote work tools such as Sparkbay are at your service.
Remote work can be healthier than traditional
How? Thanks to the best remote work tools, stress has reduced for 57% of respondents. First of all, we might be less exposed to constant evaluation by our superiors at every step of a task. Setting the right KPIs can replace constant checks and make the work atmosphere more peaceful, yet still professional. Besides, the home environment might be more comfortable to adapt to our needs. The workplace doesn't have to be limited to an often unsuitable desk, and we do not have to share it with possibly distracting colleagues either. We also have more freedom when it comes to choosing a time to take a break.
As many as 75% of respondents believe that remote work has a positive impact on their work-life balance. This is an essential aspect because the inability to reconcile private and professional life can lead to burnout, which could result in lower productivity and more frequent health leaves. The ideal way to prevent this is to work remotely. Adjusting the place and time of work to your needs can bring many benefits not only in terms of the job you're doing, but also for family life. It is easier to balance everyday life or childcare when we can choose the best time to work. Less stress associated with a good work-life balance might increase productivity and commitment to work. And more effective employees means higher income for the company.
Why exactly should I use tools?
The best remote work tools give us new possibilities. Using them not only helps adapt working to our needs, but also allows for further development. They influence our productivity and health positively, but that's not all they have to offer. They can help us leverage our potential and manage time more effectively. Why does it matter?
Reducing our daily work just to accomplish sales targets or stick strictly to KPIs isn't enough. It is also essential to be satisfied with and involved in what we do. What are the differences?
Commitment reflects an energetic drive that helps increase that all important job satisfaction. Unfortunately, not every employee enjoys their work. According to the Kahn study, worker engagement is influenced by three essential factors: meaningfulness, safety, and availability. Despite working from a distance, we can still take care of all these components. How?
Meaningfulness is about recognizing the effects of our work. It is easy to control by using the best remote work tools. They allow us to analyze data and draw conclusions in real-time. The second factor (one of the essential advantages of working from home) is the feeling of security. We can perform our tasks without fear of negative comments during a meeting. Thanks to new technologies (for example, IoT solutions) we don't have to worry about having good contact with colleagues or a boss. Last but not least, availability is the conviction of having enough skills to do the job. Often we are not able to cope on our own at maintaining excellent organization or completing tasks on time. The best remote work tools are here to give us a helping hand, depending on our needs. They allow us to improve the quality of our work, and thus help us to master skills, without wasting precious time.
A checklist of the best tools for remote work
FILECAMP
Filecamp is one of the most perfect remote work tools for staying organized, controlling access, and effective using your files.
Why Filecamp?
To effectively manage your work from home, it is necessary to organize your files well. Filecamp provides unique possibilities for sharing digital assets seamlessly that make collaborating with your partners and clients run like clockwork. Finding the right files is quicker than ever thanks to the searching by tag feature. Filecamp will find the document you're looking for by detecting a keyword used in it, so you don't have to remember the exact file name. Need a customized solution? You can tailor file access permissions to your needs. These settings give you flexible ways to control your files. One-click to send and share.
KONTENTINO
A tool created for planning your work in social media
Why Kontentino?
This tool aims to bring you intuitive and fast communication. You can collaborate by assigning tasks, calendars or post checklists. With these features, you can easily assign jobs and control appointments. Your clients can leave comments, share inspirations and accept your posts with just one click.
Another advantage is the possibility to use both its Mobile app and desktop version. This way you can create and edit posts on your smartphone, which allows you to have access to the tool in your home office. Sending post approval to clients or managers has never been so easy. The possibility of controlling the budget anytime and anywhere is also worth mentioning. All these features allow you to work much more efficiently and increase productivity while working remotely.
LIVEAGENT
LiveAgent is a tool that will help you take care of your customers and stay close to them.
Service culture at a premium level.
If you need a comprehensive remote work tool to help you organize all the data from your clients, then LiveAgent is made for you. This tool will automatically sort messages from any source into one universal inbox. It provides excellent communication between the customer and the company's support staff. All functions allow you to improve your customer service. Precise data organization, which allows faster contact with the customer, is also significant when working remotely. Emails, Live chats, phone calls, Facebook messages, Tweets, you can have them all in one place! You don't have to ask for your co-worker's information anymore, and you can find all your customer data in your home office.
SLACK
Slack is the perfect place to communicate with your team.
Bring your team together!
Slack is a great tool for organizing and maintaining clarity of work. You can create a channel for every project, topic, or team. It can be a virtual version of your office! You are able to talk to any person in your group, even if you are not in the same room. Quickly pass on important information and get feedback from the team. This tool is one of the best remote work tools.
BILLDU
Delving into the realm of remote work calls for tools that are both adept and user-friendly. Billdu positions itself strongly in this niche, catering to the needs of remote teams with its stellar invoicing, quoting, estimating and expense management capabilities.
In a world where maintaining financial clarity and precision from afar is paramount, the Billdu app simplifies processes like invoicing, payment tracking, and expense oversight. Whether you're a freelancer or part of a small team, Billdu features will adapt to your needs, ensuring efficient and seamless financial management.
TEAMWORK
Teamwork is an amazing tool that helps teams manage the entire lifecycle of their client work in one place.
Effortlessly manage your projects, team, and clients from anywhere.
Teamwork provides all the features you’d expect, as well as integrated time tracking, financial management, robust reporting, and free access for clients, to ensure your projects are delivered on time and on budget. Track every detail. Break work and projects into tasks and layers of subtasks so nothing slips through the cracks and everyone knows what to do and when it’s done.
ASANA
Asana is a great tool for managing projects and tasks.
About this remote work productivity tool heard almost everyone.
Achieve your goals more easily! To complete a project on time, we need to keep an eye on its progress. For this, we need the best remote work tools. Why? In the office, it is easier to keep things in order and meet deadlines. When working remotely, we need to pay more attention to timelines, the number of our tasks, and control at what stage assignments are made. Asana is excellent for visualizing our work and maintaining good efficiency.
NETHUNT
NetHunt is a CRM system integrated with G Suite apps and built inside Gmail.
NetHunt helps businesses to streamline their sales processes. Customer profiles, deals, sales pipelines, data filters and views, team collaboration, email tracking, bulk email campaigns, and many more are now accessible directly from your email client.
Key Features:
- Visually intuitive interface and a short learning curve
- Easy contact and customer management for end-users
- Deals and opportunities management
- Full customization to suit your workflows and business processes
- Bulk email campaigns with email tracking, templates, and campaign performance analytics
- Direct integration with Linkedin for effective lead generation
- Zapier integration to connect 1,000+ apps for automating your work
- Extensive reporting to monitor your team performance, sales results, and progress towards completing goals
- Shared conversations and @mentions for team collaboration
ProProfs
Proprofs is a feature-packed project management application. Have you heard about this remote work productivity tool?
ProProfs Projects helps users to handle business projects properly. It comes with a plethora of powerful features including, but not limited to, automated invoicing, custom fields, Gantt charts, time tracking, Excel timesheets, calendar views, and file sharing.
It has a simple user interface, which removes the need for any comprehensive product training. Another plus point is that there are mobile apps available for both Android and iOS users, ensuring that you can collaborate with your team as and when needed.
You can trust this project management tool if you want to eliminate work-related chaos. This PM tool helps keep all project members on the same page, thanks to its automated email notifications and task comments. You can generate presentation-ready reports comprising details about project progress and team performance, which, in turn, paves the way for effective team meetings.
Last but not least, it comes with different pricing models, allowing businesses of all sizes to make the right calls for themselves.
GOOGLE DRIVE
Google Drive is a cloud-based storage system on which you can keep all of your assets, and share them when needed.
Although Google Drive has been around for a while, it's only recently that it has proven to be highly useful during remote work. If you're working with documents and spreadsheets, Google Drive is perfect for sharing files with your team. The best part is that it's free (until you need more storage space).
During these times when we often have to work remotely, sharing data can be troublesome. Thanks to Google Drive, sharing documents is simplified, and collaborating is made seamless.
Apart from that Google Drive also supports all kinds of formats, like zip file, pdf, and more, so uploading and downloading different file types won’t get in the way of your work.
So, if you’re looking for a place to store your files and a great tool for collaborative work, Google Drive is your best bet. There are different alternatives online such as Dropbox, and Mega and alternatives, but we think Google Drive is much more user-friendly and easy to use.
LANDINGI
Landingi is a complex landing page and pop-up creation platform. It's another great remote work productivity tool.
Running a business without having a website is mission impossible. Although we all know that, let’s face the truth - most of us aren’t IT specialists, and the prospect of building a company’s page from scratch might seem overwhelming. Also, not many websites are truly intuitive and user-friendly. To make the buyer journey on your site smooth and increase conversions, Landingi is the exact piece of software you’ve been looking for.
No matter what your profession is, Landingi offers an array of options that combine ease of use with effectiveness to give you a great outcome. With over 250 templates to pick from, you can build landing pages that are visually appealing and provide a high level user experience. Everything is adjustable to your needs by using features from its editing panel, or by drag and dropping the elements of your choice. Besides creating a website, you can also publish your newly-designed page under a custom domain, or even directly to your custom WordPress by using the relevant special plugin.
If you already have a landing page, you might need pop-ups to catch your client's attention even more. You can create customized one with this tool and make the most of your website thanks to handy integrations. Connect your page with email automation apps or CRM, and sales integrations like HubSpot, to boost the conversion rate and take care of your customers at every stage of the marketing funnel.
LIVEWEBINAR
LiveWebinar is a webinar platform that is perfect for hosting online meetings.
Tailor video conferencing to your needs!
If you want to make your daily online meetings more interesting, try LiveWebinar. This one of the best remote work tools gives you extraordinary possibilities! Make sure your colleagues are involved in the conversation using features such as whiteboard or breakout rooms. You can freely exchange ideas and inspirations. LiveWebinar also saves you time. It's a great remote work productivity tool. With breakout rooms, you can discuss several topics during one meeting session.
Worried about arrangements made during the appointment? LiveWebinar has your back with this issue - the chat history will be saved, and you don't have to worry about losing any data or files. LiveWebinar provides you with the option of online meetings to shorten distances and cross borders. No need to worry about the quality of your video anymore - this tool offers easy browser access and clear HD Quality. What’s more, another one of its features allows you to test out your connection in advance. LiveWebinar aims to be a system that combines complex solutions with intuitiveness, so your employees can use any browser to work with this tool. You can try it for free and take your online meetings to the next level!
BOWWE
With BOWWE you'll develop your online business, saving plenty of hours! It's a comprehensive no-code builder that allows to create and grow everything online: website, blog, landing page, micro page (aka link tree) or portfolio. Its advantage is enormous ease of use, so you can edit and optimize your website yourself whenever you want! That’s why it's chosen by both marketing agencies (offering, e.g., B2B SaaS SEO agency services) and entrepreneurs. BOWWE combines all the features you need to work remotely and grow your business - both effectively. First, all pages are created with high-quality code and top-notch SEO to highly boost your search engine visibility! It also offers compelling internal apps connected with valuable marketing data analytics, so you finally may focus on continual growth. Even if you already have a website built in another tool, considering the benefits of no code tools vs engineering teams, contact BOWWE Team and they’ll help you move it!
That makes it a powerful work management solution for teams.
FYLE
Take control of your business expenses end-to-end with Fyle. Employees can easily track their expenses from applications they use like G-suite, Slack, or Outlook. Fyle’s Visa integration gives finance teams access to real-time spend data for any Visa powered credit card across the US. This means any SMB or mid-market company can now access software without changing their cards.
With Fyle, you can also automate compliance through pre-submission checks. Every report is checked against company policy at the source of its creation, thereby ensuring that only compliant reports are submitted. Keep expense fraud at bay and protect your finances and appreciating assets as you surge through remote work!
The essence of remote work tools
Remote working can bring real profits for companies. The reason for this is increased productivity and commitment of employees, as remote workers can be 20 to 25 per cent more productive than ones who do their jobs in the traditional way. Greater comfort of working from home, flexibility and a better work-life balance can result in an increased efficiency. However, this would still not be possible without using the best remote work tools.
Market requirements are changing ever faster, so we have to keep up with them despite modifications to our habits. Use the best remote work productivity tools, as you need support with planning, implementing, and maintaining good communication within a team. When choosing a tool for CRM, or a time tracking app, a free task software, try to keep in mind that the right one should not only boost your potential, but also leverage satisfaction from your work. Let's make sure that it will last for as long as possible!