Essential Tools For Successful Remote Employees

So far, more and more people choose the remote working model instead of the traditional office work. Now it’s not required to get up a few hours earlier to prepare your mind and body for a productive day, have a meal, and spend most of your time in traffic jams. Instead, all the people need is to switch on the computer and voila!

However, with remote work, nearly every company has faced setting up an effective, durable, and productive workflow for the employees working from home.

In this article, we will discuss the essential tools for effective workflow and list some of the best tools for remote employees.

Types of the Software for Remote Work

The main purpose of using different software for remote work is to create a comfortable and efficient workflow where the workers can work remotely without losing productivity. In most cases, with the right software used, companies can not simply reach but instead increase the employees’ KPI. 

For this reason, it’s essential first to analyze the basic office processes and the employee workflow first. Then, companies need to find effective software solutions that can quickly assist in creating a similar working environment online. 

Here are the most essential types of software needed for remote working:

1. Meetings and Time-Planning  

One of the essential parts of any workflow is scheduling. With having a detailed plan for a day and week, it is much easier to arrange the meetings, plan your tasks and meet all the deadlines, especially when workers need to run several projects at a time. 

If your company is looking for the right software to assist your employees, Outlook calendar can become a perfect solution to apply.

It features an intuitive and informative interface that can help make up the most productive daily, weekly or monthly schedule and set up the meeting, arrange the most suitable time for it, and inform each of the participants about the details.

Furthermore, the Microsoft Outlook calendar can change the online status of the participants to “on a meeting,” thus informing the other colleagues that they can be unavailable during the meeting time. Simple, easy, and effective tool for scheduling!

2. Video Calls and Conferences 

Secondly, it’s essential to find a decent replacement to the live communication the employees were used to in the office. The companies need powerful, functional, simple to apply and use software that will help the colleagues reach each other for a meeting easily, troubleshoot, project discussion, and work with other departments. 

Ideal remote work solutions that perfectly cover all these needs are Microsoft Teams and Zoom Video Conferencing. Each of these options offers excellent features that can increase the productivity of the meeting and reach the same communication level as the live meeting in the office. For instance, Zoom includes the following: 

• Creating various conference rooms for hosting the webinars
• Launch the specific invitations for limiting the access to the video conference
• Save the meetings and share them with other employees via the built-in webcam recorder feature

Microsoft Teams is another excellent platform to choose, as it can perform as a chat tool and a meeting platform simultaneously. Furthermore, employees like this software because of: 

• The integration with Outlook calendar, which helps to create a feature-rich working system for more productive and effective workflow
• Basic call features, screen recording, and file sharing
• Allows for the teams to work together even with work from home system
• Ensures the full security and compliance

3. Remote Access and Software Support

Another important thing to consider is to ensure all the employees will get in-time technical support and troubleshooting when working remotely.

Sometimes, employees who don’t have good programming knowledge cannot resolve technical issues like software updates, driver setup, or other computer errors. And, with the remote model, these issues become a great challenge for the companies: they need a time-effective and powerful solution to assist any department worker remotely.

With TeamViewer, your technical support managers can easily access the computer via the app and resolve the issues via the remote control option.

All needed for this is the two computers with the app, the ID number of the computer that requests for the troubleshooting, and the password generated by the software automatically. No emails, no calls, or screenshots needed – all the access will be provided in a few clicks. 

4. Collaboration and Communication

However, companies often use the Slack app if the employees need to clarify the project details or reach the other team members without spending the time for the emails.

That’s probably one of the most popular professional chatting programs widely used in Europe and America. In other words, it’s hard to find anyone who can’t recognize the iconic message notification sound of this program.

Apart from integrating with lots of other apps like Google Docs, Google Sheets, Zoom, etc., it offers a feature-rich intuitive interface, which is easy to learn even if the employees have never worked with this type of apps before. Here are some other aspects of why companies apply it for their remote workflow:

• Set up the reminders
• Send some essential pieces of information to your private channel.
• Create multiple channels for different teams within your company
• Share the documents and other important files.
• Integrate the other services to enhance the app performance and improve the workflow
• Search within the shared information in chats

All the chat members can see the current account status (online or offline), understand each member’s time zone, and reach them when they’re available (which is especially important for the onboarding processes). 

5. Cloud Storage and Document Management

Last but not least, an essential tool for remote work is cloud storage – the document management system that can ensure 24/7 access to any documents or other important files the employees need for their work.

Furthermore, that’s also one of the most secure ways for storing any corporation documentation, including research documents, reports, client information, and project details. Additionally, companies often create separate folders for each department, which is both convenient and secure. 

Google Drive and DropBox are the two most popular cloud storages, which have various features for comfortable and effective working with any files stored, including audio, video, file formats like doc, pdf, xlsx, etc.

Employees can work with online systems like Google Sheets or Google Docs to copy or edit the content. And, these services also offer the history of changes for each document so that you can restore any version of the document on demand. 

Conclusion

To sum up, setting up an effective remote workflow without powerful and feature-rich software is impossible.

It enhances plenty of processes for employees, including sharing the files, improving communication, and troubleshooting issues from home, to create the same experience as it was in the office.