Managing a remote team requires special attention to many specific details. Remote locations and different times of availability can affect team communication and make it difficult to keep track of work progress. However, special tools for remote teams help managers engage their employees, monitor their work activities, and receive useful feedback from team members. Here’s our selection of apps that managers of remote teams will definitely appreciate.
1. actiTIME
actiTIME is a powerful time-tracking and work management tool. It helps keep track of time expenses, monitor work progress, and manage teams across countries and time zones. In it, you can group employees by time zones (locations), collect time-track and billing data for specific local offices, and run time & cost reports based on this data. Simple and robust, this tool is great for big and small teams. It helps regular employees structure their workday and provides business owners with crucial data on the work process.
2. Jell
Jell helps organize and structure communication within a team. Daily online standups help you keep informed about what your remote employees are doing. Check-ins allow your team members structure regular communications: weekly recaps, monthly reports etc. if you’re a business owner or a manager, you’ll appreciate the Goals feature that provides all employees with the big picture: roadmap, objectives, and key results.
3. WooBoard
When you’re managing a remote team, it’s not really easy to build a team culture and improve teamwork. WooBoard offers features that help managers motivate remote employees, bring their company’s values to life, and increase employees’ engagement. With its ready-to-use reward and recognition system, the app is perfect for engaging and connecting people that work from remote locations.
4. Awesome Boss
As hard as it is to remember little things about your employees (especially in a remote team), it helps build trust and meaningful relationships in the team. Awesome Boss app will help you with that! The system stores information on people’s preferences (for example, favorite coffee), important days, anniversaries, and other details. It sends you an alert before an event — birthday, anniversary, etc. — and suggests gift options. The app also helps build engagement programs and reminds you when to take necessary action.
The worst thing about organizing team communication in one place is adopting a tool that is new for everyone. People are usually reluctant to get started with the new tool and use it properly. That’s why special Facebook app for work communication can be of help. Familiar functionality, combined with team communication and data security features, allows you to connect the team and get work done.
This is a web app and a Chrome extension for those who work and communicate with people from different time zones. It beautifully shows local time in locations around the world, supports 24-hour or AM / PM clock, automatically detects your locations, shows national holidays in remote locations, and groups together up to three locations that share the same time zone.
7. Doodle
Organizing a meeting in a remote team is a pain. Asking everyone when they are available and coordinating can hardly be considered an appropriate option — but thankfully Doodle app can do the coordination work for you. Run a poll and figure out when every team member is available — and then set up a meeting. The app also stores information about your polls and your upcoming meetings so that you don’t forget anything.
A good manager cares about their team’s happiness. But collecting information about possible problems within a team is usually a headache: people are reluctant to provide feedback at all and negative feedback in particular. Chimp or Champ app helps overcome this problem. It sends a weekly check-in to the employees and collects their answers as an anonymous feedback. This way, managers can figure out what is the problem — not who! — and take actions to handle it.
