One thing you can count on from your remote team: increased productivity. A study in the Harvard Business Review revealed that remote employees completed nearly an extra day’s worth of work every week compared to their in-office colleagues. This increase in productivity could be attributed to a multitude of things depending on the individual employee.
With remote work on the table, a world of possibilities opens up. Now, you can hire a UX designer who is based in Valencia to build out the structure of your website, or a virtual assistant based in Bali to handle the daily admin needs of your business. The best part – whether you have one remote employee or many, the communication channels between your team don’t have to become more complicated. Video calls and a time zone calculator are your new best friends.
In this article, we are going to talk about the companies that they are building tools for remote teams.
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Remote Team Inc.
Remote Team is an HR platform for remote or virtual teams. Remote Team lets you create customized time-off policies, automate your payrolls, manage your documents online and monitor productivity for your employees. It also automates payrolls with integrations with DeskTime, Toggl Track, and TransferWise.
Remote Team helps you to tune in with your distributed team.
Hubstaff
Hubstaff is a remote company that provides staff monitoring through time tracking software. The company was founded after its co-founders wanted a better way to manage their team of freelancers. The company is an advocate for the introduction of staff monitoring services for United States government roles. This was following a number of large invoices that have been paid by the US government for contracted work, with no proof of the hours spent on the project. Hubstaff was seen as a rising tech company in 2015 when they received a nomination as part of Techpoint’s Mira Awards for The Best of Tech in Indiana.
Hubstaff is a very cool and light tool for time tracking. As a time tracking, payment management, and employee monitoring software, Hubstaff does a great job.
Asana
Asana is a software-as-a-service designed to improve team collaboration and work management. It helps teams manage projects and tasks in one tool. Teams can create projects, assign work to teammates, specify deadlines, and communicate about tasks directly in Asana. It also includes reporting tools, file attachments, calendars, and more.
There’s been quite a bit of talk about Asana in the tech world, and when you consider some of the names involved with the endeavor, it’s easy to understand why. Co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein both held key positions on Facebook’s early startup team, and Asana’s backers include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Peter Thiel.
Āsān means “easy to do” or “easy to learn” in Persian that is parallel to its user-friendly interface and the usage of the tool.
Toggl Track
Toggl Track is a time tracking app operated by Toggl Track OÜ, headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, that offers online time tracking and reporting services through their website along with mobile and desktop applications.
Toggl Track tracks time based on tasks and projects, either through an interactive task timer or through manual entry. Toggl Track allows you to track user’s online apps.
Toggl Track offers the ability to build clients and projects, but also maintains the simplicity of a simple time tracker.
Slack
You’d be hard-pressed to find a company not using Slack or a similar communication tool to connect people working together on long-term projects. It assists with organizing communications that require a simple response—where email might otherwise be too bulky and annoying.
If you’re not using it yet, it’s best to download and start using Slack now so you’ll be used to it when a client asks you to use it in the future (and inevitably, they will).
Thanks to its popularity, Slack integrates with a lot of other best tools for freelancers shared on this list, like Google Drive, Trello, and Asana.
Zapier
Zapier is an essential tool for remote team management that ensures that all of your tools work together. This is because Zapier automates your work and connects all of your apps/tools to ensure your team is productive at all times.
This tool can integrate Dropbox, Gmail, Slack, PayPal, Buffer and many more(1,000+ Apps).
It is possible to link web apps that allow for easier data sharing.
Zapier is a tool that builds processes to ensure more work is completed within the shortest time possible.
Process Street
Process Street is one of the most powerful tools for workflow management which offers great checklist tools. It is ideal when you need your team to focus on procedures that are recurring. This checklist tool is great for time management. This is because it makes it possible for team members to prioritize tasks properly and get things done on time.
Process Street allows team managers to schedule different tasks that need to be repeated in intervals. This can be weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually.
This tool can integrate Zapier, Close.io, G Suite, Slack, Asana, etc.
Process Street helps you manage your remote team effectively. It has good integrations with other tools that help remote work.
Jira
Zoom
Zoom is one of the best free video conferencing software available today. The Basic version is free and allows unlimited 1:1 meetings. If you want more participants, Zoom offers unlimited meetings for two or more participants but caps each meeting at a 40-minute limit. Zoom offers enterprise communications, offering a secure, easy-to-use platform for messaging, audio and video conferencing, and webinars throughout room systems and desktops. The “Zoom Rooms” feature is currently a conference room solution used in huddle, training, and conference rooms around the world.
The system has been engineered with focus and expertise, customers say that Zoom is one of the most reliable solutions on the market, which is great when you’re looking for stability. With up to 500 participants and 10,000 viewers to choose from, you can adapt your strategy according to the needs of your business, and the Zoom model is easy to buy, use, and scale too.
From its straight-forward pricing to its innovative feature sets, it’s clear to see why Zoom has such a stronghold on the marketplace.
With Zoom, you enjoy the same standard experience spread across all your systems, with no complex training from one system to another.
Confluence
Confluence is a collaboration software program developed and published by Australian software company Atlassian. Confluence allows you to collect all important documentation and information in one place: a place the whole team has access to. Discussions take place where they are relevant, and where they can be stored and found later on.
Each team and project gets its own place to exchange information, documents, and other data. Access for all team members is controlled by authorization in Confluence.
Team members can work simultaneously on the same document. All changes are saved in real-time.
The days are over when documents existed in multiple versions – which had to be carefully integrated back together again.
Confluence is your team workspace where knowledge and collaboration meet to accomplish great things.
BaseCamp
Basecamp is a remote software company based in Chicago, Illinois. The firm was co‑founded in 1999 by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company. Since mid‑2004, the company’s focus has shifted from web design to web application development.
Basecamp started as a single project management tool for Jason Fried’s web design consultancy called 37signals. It wasn’t originally supposed to be a “product”—rather, it was an in-house tool that the team scrapped together because they needed a better way to handle their own work.
When they made the announcement, Fried wrote:
“We’ll never forget what made Basecamp so popular in the first place: It just works. It’s simple, it’s easy to use, it’s easy to understand, it’s clear, it’s reliable, and it’s dependable. We’ll continue to make it more of all of those things.”
BaseCamp’s employees are free to live and work wherever they want. They even wrote a book on remote working, REWORK!
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. is a US-based global company that provides hosting for software development version control using Git. It is a subsidiary of Microsoft, which acquired the company in 2018 for US$7.5 billion.
It offers the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git, plus its own features. It provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project. GitHub offers plans free of charge, and professional and enterprise accounts.
Free GitHub accounts are commonly used to host open-source projects.
As of January 2019, GitHub offers unlimited private repositories to all plans, including free accounts.
As of January 2020, GitHub reports having over 40 million users and more than 100 million repositories (including at least 28 million public repositories), making it the largest host of source code in the world.
KipWise
Kipwise is a knowledge management tool that helps remote teams share knowledge effectively and reduce communication lag by ensuring teammates from different sides of the world have access to the information that they need. Using Kipwise, you can create structured and visually appealing documentation easily. With its powerful Slack integration, browser extensions, and many more integrations with tools that remote loves, such as Google Drive, Trello, and Airtable, you can save and retrieve team knowledge easily, wherever you need them.
GitLab
GitLab is the world’s one of the largest all-remote company with over 1,200 team members located in more than 65 countries around the world.
“Remote is not a challenge to overcome. It’s a clear business advantage.” –Victor, Product Manager, GitLab
The software was created by Ukrainians Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov and is used by several large tech companies including IBM, Sony, NASA, Alibaba, SpaceX, and many more.
GitLab application offers functionality to automate the entire DevOps life cycle from planning, to creation, build, verify, security testing, deploying, and many more…
Frevvo
Frevvo is a go-to workflow automation software for teams of all sizes. It’s “a simple, easy to set up and easy to use workflow automation software that lets your employees focus on things that matter the most. No matter the business vertical, Frevvo lets you automate online forms and approval workflows with ease thanks to visual form and workflow designers and point-and-click wizards. ”
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