Modern businesses now have the luxury to have employees working outside the office, without losing efficiency and productivity. This is all thanks to widely-available Internet connections, reliable communications systems, and of course, eager and driven employees. But transitioning from a four-walled office to a remote office can be troublesome, especially if you don’t have the right tools to make it happen.
Fortunately, there are a lot of tools that can help you make your remote office on par with your old one. These are the tools you need to keep track of your progress, boost your productivity, and keep you connected with your team, even when you’re far away. Here are some of the tools that you can use to make your remote office work:
Aside from actual homes, remote workers also prefer places like coffee shops, cafes, bars and other work-friendly spaces to get things done. One person might know a couple of places conducive for working remotely, so when shared with a small community of like-minded individuals, what you’ll get is something like Workfrom. This web-based tool is used by thousands of “scouts” from over 1,250 cities worldwide.
Workfrom adds more flexibility to your already-flexible working arrangement. If you want a change of environment, you can check for the nearest co-working space in your city, or try a different café once in a while. You can also use this tool to chat with other users to share productivity tips and get leads on new projects. Not only that, you also get access to Workfrom perks like discounts on co-working fees and coffee when you upgrade to a Pro account.
One of the challenges of working remotely with a team is keeping things organized. It is easy to lose track of time and tasks when you’re at home, so having a tool like Trello to do this for you is really helpful. Trello is a productivity and collaboration platform that lets you work with your team from anywhere you may be. You get features that enable you to organize and prioritize projects, delegate tasks, update deadlines, and seamlessly communicate with teammates, as if you’re just in the same office.
Trello is the dashboard of dashboards, a project manager that you can use for all kinds of tasks, from collaborative work projects to planning your family’s vacation. When used for work, you can create multiple projects and work on them at the same time, perfect for the millennial multitasker. Trello cards offer information at a glance for these projects, giving you all the task details like comments, attachments, and more. This makes following up on pending projects easier, so that you won’t have any backlogs while you’re working remotely.
When you are working with teams, it is highly likely that you share accounts for work-related programs instead of paying for a separate account for each person. As you work on more projects and collaborate with more people, you’ll eventually be inundated with different passwords to remember. This is where the 1Password tool comes in handy. It is a repository of all the necessary passwords that you can share with one another, since all you need to remember is your login information to 1Password.
With this software, you can create different “vaults” for different teams, and just sync and share these vaults to anyone needing access. With 1Password, even when you’re sharing accounts, you’ll have peace of mind that only those who are permitted to access work accounts can use them.
The biggest hurdle of working remotely staying connected with your teammates. Yes, you can just send an email or comment on a thread, but the response time would be unpredictable. Glip is also a productivity and collaboration platform, but one of its strongest points is its messaging feature. You can directly message another Glip user, and expect to get a reply in real time. Setting up a meeting is also a breeze, as you can just add participants in a conversation. Once there, you can use the tool to create tasks, set deadlines, complete tasks, and more.
After it was acquired by RingCentral, Glip can now integrate essential apps that can help you work smarter. Integrate Box, JIRA, Zendesk, and Evernote as you need them, and you’ll see that Glip is one of the best tools that you’ll ever need when you’re working remotely.
Francis has been writing for more than a decade now, focusing on Digital Marketing in the last couple of years. He is currently in charge of writing web-optimized content for RingCentral, an industry-leading cloud phone systems provider. Francis is also a voracious reader, spending most of his free time immersed on fictional worlds. You can reach him through Twitter.
