During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses around the world have been forced to let their employees work from home or remotely. This is a step that has been necessary to take to avoid employees from spreading the virus to one another at the office.
However, even before the arrival of COVID-19, there was already a movement towards companies having teams collaborate from different locations using the internet. This has been described as either working from home (WFH) or working from anywhere (WFA).
Indeed, some major global brands have long-term plans to have their employees work from home or remotely. For example, Facebook is committed to having more than half of its staff work remotely by 2025.
Besides the COVID-19 pandemic, this movement is driven by high productivity when employees work remotely, high possibility of them accepting lower pay—as they can choose to live anywhere—and cutting office space costs.
This new working arrangement demands for tools to manage workflow remotely.
There are five types of essential tools that you need in your organization to manage your remote workflow. They provide capacity, efficiency, and security.
The tools are listed below in no particular meaningful order:
1. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
You must protect your workflows, data, and resources from possible risks that exist online. In the office, you have the local area network systems that handle much of your processes. Many of those local systems have a limited interface with the internet, which protects them from hackers and other dangers.
Meanwhile, the best way to protect your workflow online, especially when some or all staff members work remotely, is to use a virtual private network. A secure VPN for PC encrypts the communication between different team members and safeguards their privacy, which is critical to securing company data and resources.
2. Project Management Tools
You also need to have a system that guides how tasks are handled and help team members assign, collaborate, and follow tasks’ progress. Everyone in the team needs to know who is doing what at what time. It is also important that timelines are adhered to and responsibilities appropriately apportioned. This is what online task or project management tools can help you with.
Some of the project management tools include Slack, Asana, Trello (part of Atlassian), and Basecamp. While most of these tools can be used for various projects, some are specialized in particular areas. For example, Basecamp is primarily designed to support software development projects.
3. Video Conferencing or Meeting Tools
Meetings are very critical at the office. It is through them that brainstorming takes place, and ideas are shared. Through them, plans, objectives, goals, and primary key indicators (KPIs) are formulated.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the many meetings move to Zoom, the most popular video conferencing of 2020. It has contributed significantly to making the experience of holding a face-to-face meeting online one that more people find comfortable.
However, way before Zoom came into the picture, people have been using similar tools to meet. Indeed, Zoom is just one in a long list of video conferencing tools. Other very popular ones include Google Meet, GoToMeeting, and Skype.
4. Filing or Cloud Storage Tool
When a team works remotely, it must have a file storage system that allows each member to access the documents and information they need conveniently. It should also be easy for them to upload and share files with others on the team.
Also important, it should be easy to track each member of the team’s contribution, and even where changes have to replace one another, suggestions have to be filed in a way that is easy to retrieve them later. An example of a solution in this category is Google Drive, which includes applications like Google Doc and Google sheets. Others include DropBox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Apple iCloud.
5. The Remote Time Card System
Even though staff members work remotely, their individual contributions must be quantified, especially for payment purposes. One way that can be done is to assign them specific tasks as milestones or key performance indicators (KPIs). These can be used to decide how much remuneration is to be paid.
In most cases, however, the hourly contribution is the basic unit, and that has to be established. In a physical office, employees can sign in at the start of their shift and sign out when they leave the office. Indeed, one of the major concerns that employers have when considering letting employees work from home is the capacity to supervise and quantify their work contribution adequately.
But this can be achieved using remote time card systems. Some of these tools are very sophisticated, as they can track the time and how active the employee is while carrying out duties assigned to them. The supervisor and the HR department end up receiving very detailed reports they can use to make payment.
The list of software you can use to quantify and supervise the work your remote employees are doing includes Time Doctor, Toggl, and Top Tracker.
Conclusion
With these tools for those working from home or remotely, it is possible to achieve the kind of efficiency we get from employees working at the physical office. And with them being made better over time, soon there will be little excuse for most companies to continue paying rent for office space.
