remote employees

A year and a half back, companies worldwide had all the reasons to avoid or deny requests of work from home. But, by the starting of 2020, remote work became the hot trend, and 

companies that were once hesitant started advocating the benefits of remote working.

The number of people working remotely increased to a whopping 173%, and the number continues to grow.

However, managing and working with an online business team poses a unique set of challenges. When your employees work in the same location, it becomes easier to pick up on various cues like facial expressions or body language, but you have to make efforts for your remote team to work.

But how do you manage and engage an online business team you may never meet in person?

Keeping the cultural shift aside, what you need is a set of tools.

To make your life easier, we’ve listed some tools to manage your online team.

Let’s get started!

5 Tools to Manage Your Online Business Team

To make everyone in your online business team feel valued and equal, focus on building a toolkit comprising these five tools.

1. Employee engagement software platform

Are you witnessing a high employee turnover rate? Is your online business team consistently underperforming?

If so, you’re not alone! You’re facing a problem that is a common issue when working with distributed online teams – your employee engagement is low. Today, with employees confined to their homes, emotional well-being is as important as physical and mental well-being.

That’s why more and more companies are investing in employee engagement platforms and software such as Workhuman.

Why?

“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute” — Simon Sinek.”

So, when employees feel cared for by their employers, they return the care by boosting productivity. Engaged and happy employees leave no stone unturned in finding ways to make your company more profitable and efficient.

Your company requires a platform to maintain work-life effectiveness, give a reward and recognition system, retain qualified employees, and provide additional perks for keeping your employees motivated and engaged.

To cultivate a happy and safe company culture, use an employee engagement platform like Perkbox. The platform helps your online team save money because it gives discounts from hundreds of brands they know and trust.

With additional perks and benefits reducing stress and motivating your team to excel at work, the Perbox discount scheme is worth consideration. The discount scheme provides access to over 285 discounts and freebies. It’s your one-stop platform to engage and manage your online business team.

Why use this platform? Engaged teams are 21% more profitable than disengaged teams.

2. Digital and interactive whiteboards

As businesses have witnessed a seismic shift from physical to digital space, even whiteboards that were a staple of offices and meetings have taken the digital leap.

You can turn any design or sketch app into a digital whiteboard to sketch out a few ideas. It lacks the precision and features offered by a dedicated digital whiteboard. Apps turned into digital whiteboards lack the collaboration features, presentation option and don’t allow attachments.

That’s why investing in a digital whiteboard makes sense.

white boards

With digital whiteboards, you can easily pair the benefits of visual thinking, collaboration, and teaching with the convenience of technology.

One good example of a digital whiteboard is Miro. It’s a one-of-a-kind digital whiteboard that allows you to explain a process to your team members from ideation to implementation. With Miro, you can monitor changes, assign tasks to your team members and collaborate within the interface. Also, this tool allows you to choose from a long list of templates, including customer mapping, retrospective, UX design, and many more. Interestingly, it allows integration with Airtable, Jira, and Asana to make your life easier.

Why use this platform? The market for interactive and digital whiteboards is likely to reach $5.16 billion by 2023.  

3. Online training tools

To effectively manage your employees, you need to invest in world-class training and development programs because your online business team is the center of your organization’s success.

From understanding job duties to using company-specific tech tools, there are different pieces of training your online team should complete to maximize their productivity and develop a high-performing team. To capture the interest of your online team and ensure they’re alert during the training, you require training tools that can breathe fresh life into a dull training session.

Training tools like Whatfix digital adoption platform (DAP) is one such platform that would make training fun and worthwhile for your online business team.

Whether you want to train new employees or help existing employees level up their skills, DAP can provide the right guidance at the right time. Using this tool, your online team will view different pop-ups that will guide them through completing a specific task within the tool. This not only reduces content-creation time for training material but results in an effective learning process.

DAP offers conceptualized guidance, self-help material, and walkthroughs based on your team member’s role and where they are within the application.

Why use this platform? Employees are embracing the opportunity to upskill and acquire new skills.  

4. Online collaboration tools

As remote work is becoming standard for companies, communication and collaboration are becoming more fractured with every passing day.

Employees go out for a break, and they see a missed Google Hangout call, or they spend more than 30 minutes trying to find a conversation. For remote teams, facing such issues is normal. So, to avoid miscommunication and ensure your employees don’t spend too much time searching for information, consider investing in an online collaboration tool.

With a great quality collaboration tool, you can limit friction between remote work and reduce communication lag, fatigue, and even virtual clutter.

A good example of an online collaboration tool is Slack. It is an innovative communication tool and known for its intuitive UX. Slack is your one-stop destination tool for communication as it allows one-line messaging and file-sharing, provides separate channels and allows integrations with different plug-ins.  

You can convert Slack as your virtual office – a place where employees can get instant feedback.  

A collaboration tool will stop miscommunication and help you manage your team while improving productivity.

Why use this platform? 74% of people often lose files shared with others. Investing in an online collaboration and communication tool is the best way to reduce such instances.

5. Password manager software

With distributed and collaborative teams, you and your team often have to use the same tools and require access details.

With cyber-attacks at an all-time high, it’s unsafe to save passwords in an excel file or an email. 

Such places are vulnerable, and a minor glitch in your security or network is enough to turn the tables on you. Hackers getting access to your passwords would mean a data breach and may put your business at risk.

That’s where password manager comes in.

Tools like 1Password, allow your remote distributed teams to log in to necessary tools quickly. More importantly, it keeps all your passwords safe. Instead of remembering tens of passwords, remember just one password and help your employees access every digital tool in your toolkit.

Regardless of your employee’s location, provide them access to logins and important resources without fearing hackers.

Interestingly, it allows you to grant and revoke access to information based on whether you have hired new employees or former employees who have left your organization. You can even secure, manage and orchestrate your company’s infrastructure secrets with 1Password. As the tool integrates with Slack, you can get notifications about suspicious activities and see pending confirmations and recoveries.

With a password manager tool, give your remote teams a secure online environment and see your business productivity rise in no time.

Why use this platform? With 53% of people reusing the same password for multiple accounts, investing in a password manager can secure your business from cyber threats.

Choosing the best tool for managing remote teams

It’s no secret that when it comes to managing remote teams and ensuring productivity, managers and business owners have to work twice as hard as others.

This means you will always need help to streamline processes and track your employee’s activity. With just 24-hours in a day, achieving so much while ensuring business continuity becomes an uphill battle.

But the right set of online tools can make things a lot easier for your business, primarily if you work in a distributed team.

With these five remote work tools in your kitty, your remote workers will stay productive and happy. While you may find many other tools with each boasting of managing your remote team, these five tools are great to start with. You can keep on adding tools to your toolkit as your business progresses.

Did we miss out on your favorite remote working software? Be sure to share your thoughts in the comments section.