20 Best Tools to Manage Remote Employees

With this grappling effect caused by the COVID-19 virus, small companies and large enterprises across the globe have been scrambling to find ways to keep their businesses running.

With a remote work setting, businesses can limit the virus’s impact on productivity. In this article, we’ll feature the best tools to manage remote employees. As you read on, you’ll have a complete picture of the remote work software best practices you need to set up your remote team and your own home office as soon as possible.

While working remotely is gaining more popularity these days, it’s not exactly a new trend. In 2018 alone, statistics reveal that there were already about 4.3 million employees working remotely. This made up 3.2% of the entire US workforce at the time, a clear indicator that many employers are exploring modern ideas to create a more productive work environment for their employees.

There are many benefits that employers can reap from a remote work setting: it increases productivity, reduces turnover, and most importantly, it reduces overhead expenditures. With a work-from-home setup, companies don’t need to invest in office space, buy equipment, or pay utility bills. These make it the ideal work setting for small companies whose nature of work does not require a traditional office environment.

According to the SHRM 2019 Employee Benefits Survey, there are now about 69% of employers who allow employees to work from home on an ad-hoc basis. The same survey reveals that 42% of companies offer part-time remote jobs, while 27% offer them for full-time.

As more companies ditch the conventional office setting and turn to the remote work setup, the demand for cloud-based employee management tools can only surge. Take this statistic into consideration: every week, employees already spend 14.3 hours of their work online, and that’s not yet counting the hours they spend on web and audio conferencing.

Coupled with a practical remote team management guide, remote team leaders can send productivity to heights that can easily rival or exceed those from in-office setups.

So, what are the best strategies to manage remote employees?

First, employees need to take the initiative too and find all they can about how to work remotely from home. It will help you make it easier to implement solutions to kickstart your home-based office management.

To make sure that you’ll have everything you need to manage remote employees, we divided the following platforms into four categories: project management, time tracking, communication, and document management.

Project Management Software

Project management platforms allow you to keep track of all the tasks assigned to your team. They usually offer project timelines, boards, task monitoring, and workflow tools and are considered essential remote office software. Here are some examples.

1. monday.com

monday.com is one of the leading task management software available in the market today. It has a wide array of project management and workflow automation tools, helping teams collaborate and run projects efficiently. The platform is totally customizable, allowing you to build your workflows the way you want them to be.

There are a number of projects that you can use this task management software for, including marketing campaigns, sales pipelines, design planning, and event management, among many others. Within the platform, you can centralize all communication, projects, and employee management under a single hub.

monday.com

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With the essential tools to manage remote employees like project timelines, boards, automation, Column Center, and workflow templates, you can have a complete view of your business processes and manage your remote team more effectively.

2. Wrike

One of today’s best project management applications, Wrike enables teams to work on projects without the need to switch between folders, applications, and browser windows. It provides the ultimate tools for online task collaboration: interactive Gantt charts, resource management, automated workflows, and project dashboards.

Wrike provides a collaborative work management solution for teams to plan, manage, and execute projects at scale. It offers a variety of project templates that you can use for the specific requirements of your business. You can also leverage Wrike’s Proof tool, which allows you to add comments and notes directly to videos, MS files, and images to specific folders, tasks, and projects.

Wrike

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3. Zoho Projects

Built for small and midsized businesses, Zoho Projects offers scheduling and budgeting tools to streamline project management. It helps you throughout the entire lifecycle of your project, from planning to execution and completion. Through the use of Gantt charts, you can easily build project plans and monitor their progress.

Also, Zoho Projects offers a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easier for you to automate routine tasks. Regardless if you are managing a simple or complex project, the platform makes things simple with its customizable workflow tools.

Zoho Projects

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4. Trello

Trello is known for its Kanban-style list-making functionality that allows teams to work collaboratively and get more work done. It’s one of the best virtual collaboration tools that allow you to use boards, lists, and cards in monitoring projects from the beginning up to their completion.

In Trello, each work item comes with detailed descriptions made possible by the comment, attachment, and due date feature. This gives everyone in your team a glance at what a task is all about, allowing them to take the necessary actions required to complete it. With these features, the platform serves as one of the most reliable collaboration tools for remote teams.

5. Asana

Asana is a powerful task management software suitable for long- and short-term project goals. It helps you create a virtual workspace in the cloud, allowing remote team members to work together on multiple projects. It enables you to start projects and drill break them down into task items that you can assign to specific persons.

The platform provides a neat dashboard that gives you a complete overview of your projects and their progress, allowing for efficient project management. It lets you see where everything stands—are your employees making progress on their tasks and can you complete your projects on time? With Asana’s collaboration and automation features, you can streamline your workflows and monitor your team and projects in real-time.

Communication Software

Communication is important to every company, but more so for those with teams working from different locations across the globe. With the use of these work from home communication tools, you can bring your entire team together and let members collaborate more efficiently. We listed below some of the best communication platforms you can choose from.

6. RingCentral Video

RingCentral Video is an award-winning communication system that offers flexible and powerful cloud phone and webinar capabilities. It has video and audio conferencing features that can accommodate 200 to 500 participants, allowing you to experience an unrivaled online meeting experience regardless of the physical location of your team.

You can install RingCentral Video on almost any device, be it your desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone. With the app, you can directly call a single number and choose from more than 200 area codes. RingCentral Video can also provide you with a toll-free number, which makes your business more credible and accessible to your customers.

7. Slack

Slack is one of the most popular communication channels used by businesses all over the world. It has desktop and mobile versions, allowing your team to stay connected regardless of their physical location. It has chat features, video and audio calling, and screen-sharing tools to empower your team’s communication.

8. Zoom

There are several reasons why companies love using Zoom as their main web conferencing platform. For one, it takes video conferencing to the next level with its reliable audio and high definition video quality. Its ease of use when it comes to joining a meeting, screen-sharing, and adding annotations also makes Zoom the preferred choice of many businesses handling remote teams.

9. BlueJeans

BlueJeans is another video conferencing solution that brings remote teams together with its simple and immersive web conferencing tools. Powered by Dolby Voice, BlueJeans allows your team to enjoy a more natural and high-definition audio quality that you can use during your online meetings. Moreover, the platform lets you experience smart meetings with its in-app intelligence system.

10. Skype

Skype has been in the business for a while now and remains as one of the most widely used communication channels across the globe. It combines instant messaging, voice chat, and video calling features to connect teams from any global location. Moreover, it allows you to share files, images, and videos directly from the platform.

Time Tracking Software

A time tracking software is used to capture each employee’s work hours in real-time. It comes with timesheets, automatic time tracker, payroll tools, and analytics and reporting features. Here are some of the best time tracking software available today.

11. Time Doctor

Time Doctor is a time tracking software that accurately monitors the time that an employee spends on a certain task. It captures work hours in real-time to ensure that everyone is working efficiently during their shift. This feature makes it the obvious choice for many employers and managers who are managing remote teams.

Moreover, Time Doctor has a website and application monitoring feature, which provides insights into each employee’s web and app usage. The application provides you with daily and weekly reports that outline the tasks your team has worked on, as well as their application and Internet usage. Employees get to receive these reports as well, allowing them to correct any time-wasting behavior on their part.

12. Harvest

Harvest is another time tracking software that’s a top choice for businesses with remote operations. Employees can easily enter their hours in the system manually, or they can run the timer tool as they work through their tasks. It has numerous additional features as well, such as task scheduling and expense management.

Another great thing about Harvest is its compatibility with most devices. You can access the application via laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile devices. Harvest is most beneficial to freelancers and small businesses that need to keep track of the time they spend or certain tasks and projects.

13. Toggl

Toggl is a time tracker tool that makes time monitoring simple and easy. It takes only one click for you to start tracking your time or to continue monitoring your previous time entry. And in case you forget to track time, the Toggl Button and Toggl Desktop apps have an automatic reminder feature that notifies you instantly.

If you’re not up for automatic time tracking, Toggl also provides manual time entries, where you can simply and modify time entries at the end of the day or week. Plus, it lets you assign billable rates to tasks to ensure a fair and accurate payroll for your team.

14. Everhour

Everhour brings many benefits to businesses that use it. It offers several useful features to make remote team collaboration successful and effective. Aside from its time-tracking capabilities, it comes with project management tools, expense management, invoicing, and resource planning. You’ll also appreciate its powerful and flexible integrations, which allows you to use it together with the current business applications you are using.

It supports both automatic time tracking and manual time entry, which lets you capture the total number of hours your team spends to complete projects and tasks. It also has a notification feature that alerts you to neglected or long-running timers.

15. Hubstaff

With Hubstaff time tracking tool, you can smartly track employees’ hours and monitor their work-related activities. The application provides detailed timesheets that let you in on how your employees spend their work hours. It also comes with a GPS tracking tool, which allows you to monitor mobile attendance and time accurately.

Additional features like payroll, invoicing, and employee monitoring make Hubstaff a great choice for teams working remotely. You can run the application from your Windows, Mac, or Linux computers as well as mobile devices.

File Sharing Software

While most project management systems allow you to upload and store files, file sharing tools are the much better option to keep your files organized and easier to locate. They offer a centralized storage space where everyone in your team can simultaneously add, modify, or share files relevant to your projects. Below, you’ll find some great examples of these solutions.

16. Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the best file sharing tools for business and personal use. It offers secure, cloud-based storage where you can keep small and large files, images, videos, and documents. The platform is easily accessible via browsers, desktop systems, or mobile devices.

One of the great things about Dropbox is its synchronization capability, which helps your team stay on the same page at all times. All changes made to a document or folder can easily be seen in the file history. Modifications to shared content will also be automatically synced and updated for everyone in your team.

17. Google Drive

Perhaps the world’s most popular file-sharing tool, Google Drive enables you to store all your files in one highly secure, easy-to-use platform. As a cloud-based application, you can easily access your files and share them with your team by simply providing them with a link or adding them as collaborators.

Moreover, Google Drive keeps track of the changes you make to your files for 30 days. This means that you can always restore a file to its previous version within that period if you need to. Google Drive also integrates with most-used business platforms and applications so you can use it with your existing systems without any hassle.

18. HR Cloud

HR Cloud is a comprehensive end-to-end HR software. It has solutions for the entire employee lifecycle, from recruiting to offboarding. It has tools for internal communication, campaign management, content management, polls and surveys, and employee advocacies, among others. Moreover, it has powerful analytics that can even measure the ROI you get with the software. Of course, it has the usual features such as a company directory and organizational chart. Being a cloud-native platform complete with team communication and collaboration tools, the platform is quite ideal for remote work. In fact, it is one of the go-to HR solutions for teams in tech.

Its Workmates solution, in particular, is an enterprise social network. It allows for internal team communications and even socialization. When used well, it can help structure remote task management and improve employee engagement. This can eliminate the feeling of disconnect by remote workers and foster the right company culture online. HR Cloud also has a CMS feature for storing valuable information and building knowledge bases. This mix of features makes it a valuable tool for many remote and on-site teams across different industries. The easy-to-use platform also integrates seamlessly with other solutions such as QuickBooks, Office 365, and Bridge LMS among others. Lastly, product features are rolled-out according to your needs. As such, it is only available via quote-based plans.

19. Box

Like most file sharing tools, Box allows you to store and manage your files in an online storage application. It has a drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easier for you to transfer files from one storage to another. When you need to share documents, images, or videos, you can simply provide your team with a link or add them as contributors so they can have access to certain folders.

One distinguishing feature of the application is the Box Notes, a tool that allows your team to collaborate on project outlines, status updates, meeting notes, and organizational plans. Box also comes with workflow automation tools that you can use to automatically move files to their corresponding folders.

20. eFileCabinet

eFileCabinet offers a secure, automated, and compliant file sharing platform where you can upload files and documents and easily locate them, thanks to its user-friendly interface and intelligent organization system. It centralizes all your files, allowing any of your team members to access them from any location and device.

In addition, eFileCabinet has a smart automation feature that intelligently recognizes, sorts, and names files according to their content.

Managing a Team of Remote Employees

If your company is set up for a traditional office setting, it’s certainly going to take major adjustments on your part to manage employees working outside the office. Now that everyone is working from different locations, there has to be a way to bring the entire team together. The just presented collaboration tools can help you accomplish just that. These software will also make remote work easier and help employees become more productive.

Tools like monday.com can streamline your workflow and help you monitor the tasks assigned to your team. In case you want to dig deeper, you can find out more about the features of monday.com in our guide.

On the other hand, Slack and Zoom both offer frictionless communication, so no matter where your employees are, you can easily hold online meetings and web conferences. There are also time-tracking tools like Time Doctor and Harvest that can help you keep track of the billable and nonbillable hours of each employee.

Technology has come this far–allowing anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection to work from the comforts of their home. So long as the nature of your business allows it, then maybe it’s high time for you to take advantage of the home-based work setting.

By Stephanie Seymour

Stephanie Seymour is a senior business analyst and one of the crucial members of the FinancesOnline research team. She is a leading expert in the field of business intelligence and data science. She specializes in visual data discovery, cloud-based BI solutions, and big data analytics. She’s fascinated by how companies dealing with big data are increasingly embracing cloud business intelligence. In her software reviews, she always focuses on the aspects that let users share analytics and enhance findings with context.