Contributed by: JT Ripton
Technological innovation has changed what we know about the age-old office and has given employees the ability and flexibility to work and be productive from home. Mobility is the name of the game now, and if you have employees working remotely, there are a host of powerful apps designed to help the business person run his company efficiently and effectively.
If you have remote employees of any kind, you’re going to want these six tools.
1. Trello (Task Management)
Trello is a task management program that can be opened by everyone on your team and changed in real-time. It displays projects, who is working on them, and what has been accomplished.
The program lays tasks in columns like cards pinned on a board. Cards are dragged and dropped between lists showing the progress of each task. Employees can be added to each card and reorganized as necessary.
Upload files from your personal computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud services. Feedback and changes are instantaneous, and you can set the program to notify you when progress is made by team members.
2. Timesheets
Get a handle on how much time your employees are actually working at their desks with the Timesheets.com employee management suite. Track your employees’ time by the hour or by project. Bill on project time, pay out on payroll time. Keep track of time-off and capture reimbursable expenses. You can also download and store simple HR docs like performance reviews, and keep track of loans, commissions, and bonuses.
Employees record their hourly time by logging in to Timesheets.com and “clocking-in.” This system offers benefits beyond traditional time tracking methods. It saves time, increases accuracy, and reduces payroll size. It also allows you to manage employees and their payroll regardless of where they are located.
The program also features customizable reports, overtime prevention settings, supervisor approval rules, security features, and more.
3. Evernote
Evernote allows you to bring all your loose ideas, handwritten thoughts, and even research notes, together into a multiuser database. This is reason enough to employ this powerful program if you have remote employees.
Evernote can also be used to collect images, videos, notes, voice recordings, scribbled messages, and put them together where they can be accessed and edited. Instead of these disparate items being lost over time, Evernote’s phenomenal organizational structure gives you direct access to them so they can be expanded and recalled.
4. GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is the best professional conferencing software available and is ideal for remote employees who need to conduct meetings with clients.
The program is simple – just launch the program from your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone and your meeting has begun. Invitations to meetings can be sent by email, phone, or instant message. Attendees can log in using VOIP, or call in by phone.
All participants can be seen by each other, and they can chat privately. You can also click on Show My Screen to allow all attendees to see your screen for instant collaboration. There is a fee for this service. A free, and less professional version of this software, which is great for holding in-house meetings is Google Hangouts.
5. Dropbox
One thing your business and your remote employees are going to need is a single repository from which to draw and work on all your important documentation. Dropbox is the perfect solution.
Team members can sync and share data from any device and work concurrently on documents regardless of the physical location. Dropbox offers safe, reliable, and fast access with powerful administrative controls, allowing you to protect your organization inside and out.
These six apps are essential to running an effective remote team, giving you, the employer greater flexibility, streamlining your administrative tasks, and allowing you to operate your business with employees that are spread out geographically.
Contributed by JT Ripton. Follow him on Twitter @JTRipton.
6 Responses
Yeah, gotomeeting is nice, but I have gone with R-HUB web conferencing servers because of its unprecedented security and one time cost. It simply works flawlessly.
I’d like to suggest proofhub.com for project and task management. A great communication and collaboration tool for managing your teams, time and tasks. Should be on the list!
Another great team management tool that works well also fo remote teams is kanbantol.com . It’s good and relatively cheap, so in my opinion totally worth trying. Especially that you can try it for free!
Undoubtedly these are the best tools any employer can trust to track the work of their employees.
Being a project manager to keep track of staff and work using MS excel is really difficult. A tool really comes handy and only way for us right now to accomplish the goal is to wrap up every single project within the given time-frame to avoid confusions by using work form home software.
I might suggest that you try timesheets.com to track projects for billable and non-billable hours. You can even use it free for yourself to see if you like the service or not. It’s an incredible tool to keep your projects organized and also provides insight into your spending. You can try it free now.