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Perhaps your company has long utilized training for a hybrid work environment, in which there is a mix of remote and in-office workers, or maybe you find yourself having to support a full remote workplace. Whatever the case may be, here are the 5 best remote working tools for communication and management.

 

Prepare yourself for these 5 common remote work communication challenges

 

Why do we need remote working tools?

Remote working tools are more important than ever as it cal help people work remotely effectively, regardless of the location. These tools may refer to the communication and networking systems, including video chat applications or messaging tools, cloud storage, task and project management systems, remote team management apps, etc. There are plenty of remote working tools for you to choose with hundreds of applications.

The outstanding feature of every remote working tool is that it has a wide range of integrations with other tools, making it very easy to use and facilitate remote cooperation. The onboarding of new employees should be seamless with good remote working software too.

 

What are the most used and effective remote working tools?

In this article, we will provide you with the top 5 most used and effective remote working tools. Each of these tools has its pros and cons, and before rushing in anything, you can always try out the trial version to understand it from your own perspective.

 

Trello – Web-based, Kanban-style, List-making application

Trello is a very popular and familiar application for task management and list-making. This tool is built with Kanban Style which categorizes your tasks into different groups, hence team members can keep track of what has been done, what is being done and what to be done.

 

 

Imagine your dashboard as an old-school whiteboard for management with Trello. This is considered the perfect choice for all of your project management needs. With Kanban principles, it is easier for you to visualize teamwork from every angle and more importantly, it is easier to move projects forward and make room for priorities.

This remote working tool is used by thousands of businesses every day, and it continues to prove its help when remote working is on the rise.

When using Trello, you don’t have to worry about potential miscommunication as it builds a robust and seamless workflow.

 

Slack – Proprietary business communication platform

Slack is another popular remote working tool trusted by many businesses, especially those in the IT sector.

What makes Slack special is the way it can provide an easy-to-use chat/channel communication tool that can keep everyone connected with a user-friendly interface.

 

 

For example, it’s easy to create “channels” (equivalent to a group chat room). However, if you don’t set clear team communication boundaries, it can lead to the overwhelming number of conversations for team members to keep up with.

Slack allows users to integrate the operations with other products such as G-Suite, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, and so on.

Slack bots are very work-supportive as it can boost morale by giving birthday reminders and team reports.

With all of these features, it is hard to imagine a remote team that is communicating without using Slack. You can install Slack on your PC or your mobile to work on it wherever and whenever.

In late 2020, Slack was acquired by Salesforce, giving them a larger foundation to compete with Microsoft Teams, which is another chat app and video conferencing tool. Slack is expected to add more features to support virtual workspaces for better remote work communication.

 

 

 

Asana – Workplace management tool for better communication

Asana is a customizable workplace content management system (CMS) that is designed to help a wide range of companies achieve their organizational needs. More plainly, it’s an advanced organizational tool to help streamline projects.

Asana is made so that workplaces of any size can analyze their progress and address issues all in one place, eliminating the need for constant meetings, email updates, and memos.

 

 

Asana has a wide range of features available to help companies and the teams find a system to get things done as efficiently as possible.

Asana’s main feature is its project and task management tools. You can create lists or boards to host certain projects as a whole — these will detail all the initiatives, meetings, and programs involved in said projects.

From there, you can break these projects into tasks and subtasks to make them more manageable, and list the steps to complete them.

 

Confluence – Remote-Friendly Team Workspace

Confluence is a team workspace that supports knowledge/documentation sharing and collaboration. With dynamic pages, team members can give idea to create, capture and collaborate on any project or idea. With Confluence, it is easier and more effective for you to structure, organize and share work.

Team members also have visibility to institutional knowledge and access to the information they need for their work.

 

 

Some of the outstanding features of Confluence includes:

• Powerful collaborative editor that allows you to create meeting notes, project plans, product requirements in real-time.
• Accelerated feedback loop with inline comments on pages and files attached.
• Templates for daily reports and documentations.
• Edit attached files with the apps on your desktop (Cloud only): It lets you open files stored in Confluence with your desktop apps and edit them, then automatically re-uploads the updated version to Confluence. Now you can get feedback on that preso, edit it in Powerpoint, and have it back on Confluence in no time.
• Can provide feedback directly on your files (images, PDFs, spreadsheets, and presentations) and it keeps track of versions automatically, so you’re always working on the right one.
• Collaborate from anywhere: You can sync your confluence with your iOS or Android device and work from anywhere. You can track team activity, give feedback, and stay in sync between mobile and desktop.
• Organized workspaces: In Confluence, you can create a space for every team, department, or major project to share information and keep work organized.
• Page and file versioning: You can track every version and change that you make to a page. Files are automatically versioned.

 

Zoom – Video conferencing for smooth communication

Zoom is a video conferencing tool that is exceptionally lightweight and integrates directly into Google Calendar.

Even though it does have options for messaging, Zoom is mostly known for its high-quality video calling.

With a free plan, you can get 40 minutes’ worth of conference time. And with a pro plan, you are entitled to much more, including webinar hosting features, which can be great for your online marketing efforts.

 

 

One of the features that users find most useful is video recordings. You can use these recordings to create educational videos or document common procedures.

The 5 remote working tools mentioned above are the most popular ones that have been developed long ago for IT project management. With the pandemic forcing businesses to implement remote work, these tools have become more useful than ever.

If you’re still wondering how to achieve the most effective way for remote work communication, you can contact us to talk to one of our experts in this matter.

• Website: https://www.lotus-qa.com/
• Tel: (+84) 24-6660-7474
• Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/LotusQualityAssurance

The New Normal amid the Covid pandemic makes remote work on the rise, asking businesses and employers to implement remote communication best practices to master the new virtual workplace. More than half of the asked IT leaders indicated that communication is the most pressing challenge in remote worker management.

So, a question for every business manager, CIO, or even CEO is how to implement remote communication methods in their operations and have creative ways to collaborate with remote employees.

In this article, we will discuss the remote communication best practices in 5 different aspects:

• Remote work management
• How to communicate when working remotely
• Device management for effective communication
• Remote work environment
• Training when working remote

Also read: 5 common remote work communication challenges

 

1. Remote work management

The first and foremost aspect that every manager wants to ask about remote work communication best practices is management. Management used to be task allocation, monitoring and administration, etc. With a co-located team, managers can easily track cues to indicate the communication issues and fix them. In contrast, a remote team works off the screen, prompting challenges for the managers.

From a place of having physical and emotional contact, managers now have little to no direct interaction with their employees. From a place of easy-to-manage work platforms such as Skype or Excel spreadsheets, managers are required to implement some of the tools and approaches to achieve remote work communication best practices.

Cloud project management tools

With remote communication, managers want to increase their involvement in how the task is done by the team members. With the fear of the employees abandoning their posts and losing focus on the job, some managers implement extreme measures of hourly reports and micro-managing.

Well, this is not a very “healthy” approach for management. Rather than impose unreasonable rules on the staff, many managers have come to the cloud project management tools such as Trello or Asana.

These tools have proven their productivity in managing tasks within projects as it can split the work into smaller tasks. For every task, staff can add details, deadlines, to-do lists, etc.

Some of these also support calendar sharing and file sharing, creating a very convenient and straightforward work environment.

Another great thing about these managing tools is to push notifications. When the task dues, when the sub-tasks should be completed to keep up with the overall plan, etc. are all integrated upon customization.

 

 

 

No more micro-managing

It is challenging to control remote teams when the managers can’t go and see what their staff are doing. Many of them try to contact team members numerous times a day to manage and assess their work. Still, successful remote work is not limited to the result of one project. It is also about how you encourage members and not bombard them with calls and emails.

Micro-managing was never an effective approach for management in the long run. And the overuse of this can lead to team members feeling like they’re not trusted. To omit micro-managing from your system, try to come to management platforms to get what your staff is doing.

KPI Clarification

For any projects, especially IT ones, the schedule, progress, requirement, and KPIs must be clarified.

Agreement in schedule and progress should be built based on:

• Your project release plan or business plan
• The estimation of team leaders of how much work their staff can do

For requirements and KPI, they should be based on the projects’ goals and objectives. KPIs can vary greatly with different projects. They include but are not limited to:

• Response time measures the time for the tech team to respond to bugs and defects
• Product backlog indicates the number of tasks expected to be done
• Schedule compliance measures the ability to follow the predesigned plans.

2. How to communicate when working remotely

The methods which businesses use to communicate with their teammates should also be changed to successfully communicate with a remote team.

Use video conferencing

Perhaps the most fundamental way to improve remote work communication is to switch to video calls. It can also help improve the performance of your remote team.

As there are 3 types of distances in a remote team, including Physical (physical and time distance), Operational (skill level differences), and Affinity (shared value and trust differences).

With any of these types, face-to-face contact can help connect the team member through emotional bonds. With pictures of emotions and attitudes transferred through, a sense of familiarity and bonding is formed. Instead of dull screens, team members have the tendency to involve more in the conversation, hence a more effective way of communicating.

In a normal workplace, employees can face-to-face discuss with the managers his/her problems. However, in a remote work situation, this is impossible. For an employee, texting his employers is something very difficult, as they might think that texting is something more intimate that should come from friends and family.

In this case, the managers should be the one who encourages the one-on-one setting. With a familiar messaging tool such as Skype or Slack, this one-on-one chatting session can be very easy and effective.

Virtual “water cooler”

The term water cooler is used to refer to the time/place in which the team has a small hangout for them to talk about their personal lives. Of course, with a remote work setting, a “water cooler” time means video chatting for team members to keep up with each other’s lives.

It can be either a 30-minute session or it can be or more, and it should be conducted weekly.

3. Device management for best practices

For remote team communication best practices, managers should also contemplate device management to have effective communication.

For example, if you want your employees to stay connected through video calls, you have to make sure the mic and the webcam on their computer work. If they don’t work, what is your next action as the manager? What kind of allocation needed to provide the comprehensive tools for your staff to communicate? If you don’t have enough devices to allocate, what is your next action?

Get the answer to these questions, and you should keep in mind that to provide sufficient infrastructure for your staff is to provide a supportive remote work communication and environment.

Also read: 5 remote working tools for communication and management

4. Remote work environment

The emerging trends of remote work require managers to take serious measures to cope with the unprecedented change amid the pandemic. To take matters into your hands and operate a well-oiled machine, managers have to build a professional yet supporting remote work environment.

To achieve such an environment, the first thing to be done is the formation of remote work policy outlines. With a well-designed and robust workflow created by reasonable work policies, employers can further streamline and manage IT projects.

There’s one thing you should know about creating a remote work policy. This set of rules should go into detail about every aspect of remote work, including working hours, legal rights, and cybersecurity requirements. Other than that, the means of communication and how employees should communicate throughout the work-from-home process should be indicated clearly.

With a remote work policy on your hands, employers are still prone to many problems when implementing it. Whenever this happens, it is highly recommended that they should look back into what has been done and what could have been done to revamp the situation. Sitting down with your employees to figure out the right remote work environment is also a must.

Besides setting a remote work policy, employers should also be open more to flexibility. Your employees have the right to work in the hours that work best for them. Flexible working hours, objective-oriented management, and virtual team-building activities are the factors that can contribute to supportive remote work communication.

5. Training when working remotely

To provide sufficient and comprehensive knowledge for employees, even when working from home, employers have to contemplate training in their preparation.
Training, in this case, not only means technical training but also system-scale training. By that, we meant the training of procedures, working process, and how to communicate effectively in a remote team.

To transfer knowledge from one staff to another, the employers should conduct regular training on both technical, mindset and work process aspects. There should be also a checkpoint test to ensure team members can understand the knowledge.

Communication in a remote team doesn’t have to be as overwhelming or all-consuming as it used to be. To achieve remote work communication best practices, you should focus on the management, method of communication, device for communication, training for communication and remote work environment.

If you want to talk to an expert for advice and tips for communicating successfully with remote teams, you can contact us via:

• Website: https://www.lotus-qa.com/
• Tel: (+84) 24-6660-7474
• Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/LotusQualityAssurance