Managing Remote Teams – The Essential Tools

The remote work model is quickly gaining momentum and many businesses are jumping on board, thanks to its advantages. There are many researches on remote work emphasizing all the benefits both companies and employees gain.

For instance, remote workers are much more satisfied with the ability to organize and prioritize the tasks on their own. Surveys have also shown that remote workers take fewer days off and stay motivated longer while working from home.

Despite all the perks, there are some challenges both managers and employees face. It all boils down to preserving collaboration on the highest level even when the team is located in different time zones. Having a diversified team spread across the globe occasionally leads employees to feel social withdrawal and isolation. It can also lead to the inability to track goals or misunderstandings around project priorities and generally not being on the same page with the rest of the team. But, using the proper remote team tools will help tackle these issues.

As a result, there is a cost reduction, work flexibility, and an overall increase in productivity rate.

So how does an organization succeed in managing distant teams? For starters, having a remote working policy and training program is recommended. However, taking things a notch higher entails having specific tools that will enable you to implement the policies and successfully manage your entire team. Some companies are afraid to implement tools as they see it as just another expense, but if they would do a bit of research they would be surprised at how many of these awesome tools are actually free!

Our blog talks about the essential tools ideal for remote team management.

The best tools to manage remote teams 

Communication Tools for Remote Teams

Communication plays a pivotal role in any organization, whether you want to collaborate with employees or keep everyone in the loop. Although e-mail is widespread across employees when it comes to more formal communication, employees can now save time and send documents and files effortlessly through chat systems available on many platforms. Furthermore, scheduling weekly catch-up meetings with your team members is crucial for progress tracking and discussing company goals. It’s easy to stay in touch and monitor your team, regardless of time zones, when you use proper communication tools. Below are some of the tools we highly recommend.

Zoom – face to face video conferencing

Zoom is a great tool for managing remote teams. It typically provides face-to-face video calls that are convenient when it comes to communicating with distant teams. This video app is ideal for holding organizational meetings and one-on-one team chats. Although there are other alternatives such as Skype and Screenhero, Zoom is the most preferred, thanks to its simplicity. 

Pricing: There is a free pricing plan that includes private and group chats during the meeting, as well as meetings for up to 100 participants. If you want to record your meeting, stream it on your social media, or include more participants, there are pro, business, or enterprise pricing plans starting with $14,99 a month.

Telegram – a group communication app

Telegram is pretty effective when it comes to individual or group communication. This platform can host a maximum of 200,000 members making it quite convenient for large groups.

Pricing: This app is free, without any advertisements and subscription fees.

Slack – collaborative remote communication tool

This platform is convenient, particularly when you’re trying to communicate with a remotely distributed team. You can use Slack to collaborate, brainstorm, ask each other questions, share files, compare thoughts on new releases, and much more. Slack also creates a platform where employees can freely interact. 

Pricing: You can use Slack for free with some limitations, or upgrade to one of their pricing plans starting with $8 a month.

Project management tools for remote teams

When you get the opportunity to work from the comfort of your home, the focus could drop, and you suddenly stumble upon plenty of unfinished tasks and projects. Immediately you start missing your office and coworkers to remind you of the things you need to finish.

The thing you need is an application that will keep you on track. Project management tools are essential in any organization, more so with remote teams. These tools give you an effective method of prioritizing and completing tasks. They help you streamline your upcoming tasks and work efficiently. Here are some of the most reliable ones in the market now.

Asana – bringing all your team efforts in one space

This particular remote management tool brings all of your team’s efforts into one place. It typically organizes and assigns your tasks; all you have to do is choose the project view that best suits your needs and collaborate it from anywhere. Using Asana enables teams to understand what they need to do right away, which tasks are most important, and when work is due. Your work progresses over time, and you also manage unscheduled or top priority tasks. 

Pricing: There is a free pricing plan that includes unlimited projects, tasks, messages, storage, and a lot more. If you want to enable more features, pricing plans are starting at $13.49 per month.

Trello – amazing task prioritization app

If you want an effective task prioritization and workload app, then Trello is a perfect choice. It typically helps you to minimize tasks, project plans, and the entire team’s backlog. Trello is not only simple to use, but it’s also transparent and makes it easier to access your workload. 

Pricing: This is mainly a free service that lets users work with unlimited boards, lists, and tasks. There are also business and enterprise plans starting with $10 per user a month.

Monday – keeping you in the loop

When you want an app that keeps you connected and aware of what’s going on in an organization, then choosing Monday is your best bet. Monday offers different options for visualization, tool integration, and planning and tracking your team’s work. Additionally, they have 24/7 customer support.

Pricing: There is a free pricing plan if you have a small team consisting of up to 2 members. For larger teams, pricing plans are starting with $8 a seat a month that includes unlimited free viewers, 5GB storage, prioritized customer support, and a lot more.

Dubsado – the app that cuts your busywork

Dubsado is a business management platform that our company plans to use for CRM and workflow automation. Dubsado allows you to efficiently manage all your business administrative tasks, such as proposals, contracts, client information, sales CRM, and more.

One great feature of this tool is that you can create a separate private client portal, so clients have access to their dashboard. Their templates can all be customized easily as well.

There is a learning curve to this one, and you do have to put in the time to set up your docs and custom workflows but once that is done you’re ready to rock. Their support staff is really helpful.

Pricing: $35 per month or $350 per year for the tool. This also includes 3 team member spots. Additional private dashboards for your clients will cost you $10/per additional brand/mo and if you want to add additional team members, prices start at $25/mo for 4-10 additional users. 

ClickUp – an easy-to-use management tool

This tool is effective when it comes to managing remote teams. ClickUp is a tool that is used to manage staff and organizational projects. All of this is done on a single platform where it becomes easier to manage both your employees and tasks remotely. 

Pricing: The free version of this app offers all the features that small businesses need. There is also a paid version starting with $9 per month. 

Basecamp – tracks deadlines, tasks, and files

This app is effective for managing projects and communicating with members remotely. Basecamp helps you keep track of deadlines, tasks, and files. It’s also effective when it comes to conveying information or facilitating online group discussions. On the other hand, compared to Asana, Basecamp has fewer features and integrations. However, it has faster support and affordable pricing. 

Pricing: It has a 30-day free trial plan, and after this period the price is $99 per month and includes all the features your business needs. 

Time management tools for remote teams

Good time management is a key to a successful remote work career. There is no one to remind you of the schedule, so you could get stuck while delaying the tasks you don’t like that much. Therefore, you need a tool to help you track your progress and how much time you spend on particular parts of your work. Time tracking tools are efficient in transparency, accountability of employees, and understanding a remote organization’s billing and operational system. Below are some of the recommended time tracking tools ideal for remote teams.

Timely – a reliable invoicing tool

Timely is the best Hubstaff alternative as it’s quite useful for accurate invoicing, managing resources, and KPI tracking. In other words, this remote team management app automates all the records within an organization.

Timely also records all remote employee tasks and writes their timesheets. Managers can then analyze personnel workloads, capacity, activity, and project expenditure using ready-made real-time dashboards. This app is completely free.

Jira – effective workflow mapping tool

Jira is designed to help remote teams manage their tasks effectively. This software is a powerful management tool. It’s used for workflow mapping and task tracking. Jira also comes with lots of other features and add-ons which makes managing remote teams a breeze. It offers a free pricing plan that includes up to ten members. You also have a 7 day free trial of the paid version of the app, which costs $7 per user a month. 

Toggl

Toggl is a great tool that allows you to create a two-week plan for the entire team. It also lets you track your daily activities across different platforms. You are provided with detailed insights that help you optimize your workflow by identifying areas where you can improve. The whole schedule is also typically easy to view and access. 

Pricing: There is a free pricing plan for up to five members, and paid ones starting with $9 per user per month for unlimited users.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools for remote teams

CRM software is ideal for growing your business, managing your clients and vendors, and boosting sales. Those tools are usually very powerful, and sometimes on the expensive side. They are best used for fast-growing start-ups but can be important in stable organizations as well. If you or your team didn’t use CRM before you might need a bit more training especially around the sensitive billing components of the tool. Making a mistake can be costly, like double billing or sending the wrong newsletter email to your potential clients. Fortunately, these tools have pretty good customer service agents that could assist you on time. Here are some of the popular ones:

Keap (former Infusionsoft)

This is a user-friendly CRM software that also allows you marketing automation and e-commerce functionalities in one suite. It is ideal for small businesses.

Pricing: Pricing plans start with $79 a month and there is a 14-day free trial for each plan.

Zoho

This is a powerful suite of software to run your entire business consisting of presentations, databases, spreadsheets, invoicing, CRM, and a lot more. This app is one of the best customer relationship management software on the market.

Pricing: If you run a small business, a free version of this app should do the job. There are also paid pricing plans starting with $14 a month billed annually, which also include a 15-day free trial for each paid version.

Hubspot

This platform allows you to build websites, manage social media, send emails, publish content, and a lot more- all in one place. It has a comprehensive free edition that outshines the most paid ones on the market.

Pricing: There is a free version as well as a paid one that costs from $35 per month.

Zendesk- customer relationship management software

Zendesk is a flexible CRM software that offers customizable tools to build customer service portals, knowledge base, and online communities. It brings all customer interactions to one easy-to-use platform to keep track of all support requests, answer questions quickly and monitor customer service agent’s effectiveness.

Pricing: Zendesk pricing starts at $19.00 per user, per month. They do not have a free version, although it has a 30-day free trial.

Our Team’s Favorites

Some tools work for one type of business but they don’t for another. That’s why it’s important to test them out with the free trial and find the right one for your business and industry before introducing it to the whole team. For our small remote recruitment business these turned out to be a good choice:

Notion – user-friendly, customizable project management tool

Once you get started with Notion they offer a range of templates depending on what your business is. That is a great jumping-off point and after that, you can customize it as you need. The overall design is refreshing and we love to create our job posts there (under the Job Board tab) and then we can share it with the client, download it as a doc, or even publish it on the internet. We use it for delegating tasks or working on group projects.

Pricing: Their packages range from 0 to $4 per month for personal use or $8 to $20 per member per month for company packages. The company package has a free trial option with a storage limitation.

Canva – content creation software

Canva is another reliable app that will enable you to create social media content and grow your business online. Canva has templates for all social media channels, but you can also create infographics, brochures, logos, business cards, resumes, and even video content.

Pricing: Regular Canva is free, while the Pro version is $119.99 per year and Enterprise one is $150 per month for 5 members.

Hubspot – free CRM software

Hubspot is the best CRM Agency tool for CRM.

For many companies around the world having a CRM (customer relationship management) platform is critical when you’re pitching business and tracking customer engagement. One of the reasons why Hubspot is so popular is because It offers a variety of tools for free.

With Free Hubspot tools you can easily view up-to-date sales information on a customized dashboard, store all customer information and data, track customer interactions automatically, and more!

Pricing: Essential tools are free but there are also a few paid options, Starter plan starts at $50/mo and they also offer Professional and Enterprise plans. You can also save big if you pay upfront for a whole year. 

Clockify – free time tracker

We tried a few other ones, but this one is the most user-friendly for us. It allows you to track your time and distribute the time by projects, clients, and teams. 

Pricing: It is completely free.

Hunter – email finder and deliverability checker

Hunter is useful especially if you have a sales or client management role that entails sending cold email outreach with delivery reports. 

Pricing: There is a free version of this app that includes up to 25 searches per month, but also pricing plans are starting at $49.00 a month.

Lastpass- freemium password manager

As you hire people, storing and sharing confidential information like login information becomes a necessity. 

Pricing: There are a few packages from free ones to business plans that are 3.90 euros or 5.70 euros per user per month.

Google package (Gmail, Google Meet, Google Drive, Forms, Calendar, Google Keep)

Google offers a wide variety of tools to meet each of your remote working needs. Many companies around the world rely on Google to keep their remote teams connected and organized. 

The Google Workspace (former G-Suite) comes with everything you need for a digital workplace and It’s popular with companies both big and small. File-sharing and storage tools are also included with a minimum 30Gb disk space in a Starter pack up to 5TB in Business Plus, but It doesn’t end there, Enterprise offers as much storage as you need. 

Pricing: You can use most of the tools individually for free but using Google Workspace comes with many perks. The business starter is only $6 per user, $12 for Standard, and the price for Business Plus will cost you $18/User/Mo. An enterprise plan is also available. 

Grammarly – writing assistant tool for spelling or engagement omissions

Even if your team is fully fluent in English, having a tool like Grammarly helps with those small mistakes you make when in a rush or tired. You can use it online or as a Chrome extension, which is very handy.

Pricing: free or for more advanced packages $12 per month or $12.50 per month per user.

Timezone converter

If working with clients and a team spread around the world a timezone converter comes in handy to make sure you don’t make any mistakes when scheduling a meeting.

These tools are usually completely free.

Zapier- automation and integration tool

The tool integrates the tools that you use, for example, Trello and Gmail, and in that way you save time on certain tasks.

Pricing: There is a free pricing plan that includes 100 tasks/mo and also paid ones if you have more ongoing tasks. Paid pricing plans start with $19.99 per month billed annually or $29.99 month-to-month.

Ready to improve team productivity and efficiency with these apps? 

Once you pick the tools you’d like to use with your team, there comes another challenge to overcome: getting your team to use them. I know it may seem absurd, but it’s pretty common for teams to struggle with this, no matter how compliant they are.

Using new apps is a habit that should be built, so be patient with them and in the beginning, remind them to use the tool and show them how much it would benefit them (from lowering the time spent on certain tasks to easily extracting the information they couldn’t before).

Communication, time tracking, note-taking, and project management tools play a pivotal role in the overall productivity and management of a remote team. While working together, you get to know your employee’s strengths and weaknesses, thereby cultivating a healthy work relationship regardless of location is a priority.

We’ve talked about the tools and how important they are in our day-to-day work but without the actual talented and capable team members – tools are just that – tools. If you need a talented remote workforce – send us an email using the contact form here.