3 Essential Remote Management Tools

More and more business these days are being won over by the benefits of using remote workers… that is employees who spend the bulk of their time working away from the office.

There are many benefits to having your team working remotely. Firstly, there is the opportunity to cut costs. While we would not advise you dispensing with a central office altogether, you can certainly downsize to a smaller one. Plus, you will not have to stump up for some of those contractual perks you may give your staff, such as season-ticket loans for their commute.

You will also have a happier and more motivated staff too. Allowing people to work flexibly to suit their lifestyle, and not have to endure a lengthy commute into a city centre each day will make your staff more energized, motivated, and happy. This is turn will leave you with a more productive and loyal team working for you.

One of the issues that many managers have had with remote working in the past is a perceived inability to oversee their team and contribute to their work. But in recent years there has been an explosion in the number of online tools and apps that are available to help with remote team management.

Indeed, one of the hardest decisions for a manager these days is not whether to encourage remote working, but which tools to use to do it.

I have set-up and run several successful businesses and have always relied on remote working staff to support me. Along the way I have used many of these online tools, and there is no doubt in my mind which are the 3 essential remote team management tools that no manager should do without:

Trello

Managing the workload is a top priority for all remote team managers, and by some distance the best tool to help you do this is Trello.

Trello is a Project Management tool that allows you to monitor the progress of different strands of work and communicate about it. IT works a bit like an online pin board. You can have different boards for different areas of work and on those boards you can create cards with details about individual projects or assignments.

These can be tagged with the team members working on them and can be updated as regularly as you decide. You can also attach work to it, and have a message stream about individual projects.

These cards can be moved through different categories to indicate how they are progressing and this helps both the team to keep track of their own workloads, and the management to have oversite and input as well.

Trello makes remote team management a doddle and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

Slack

Another big concern for management is that of communication. Having all of your team in the same office makes it easy to communicate with them either as a group or individually. Building a personal rapport with your staff can be important for successful man management, and some struggle to see how this can be done online.

Well Slack helps you overcome that hurdle. It is an instant messenger service, but unlike you may have come across, it is tailored to suit business workers. You can create your own channels which can be broken down for different team members, projects and so on.

You can have one-to-one channels to talk to team members individually, and you can also set channels for different topics and themes.

I find it helps to have some random, person channels to allow teams to chat just as friends. This can help to build relationships and camaraderie between team members, and replaces the general chat around the water cooler you might have in a conventional office.

With Slack, office communication issues are solved as are any problems you might have with effective man management.

A VPN

The last of my three essential tools is a VPN, and I have gone with this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, there is the security element. If you are connecting to the internet via a VPN, all of your traffic is encrypted. This means everything you are doing or saying it is secure, even if you are connected to a public Wi-Fi network.

For a remote team, this protects your communication, and also any potentially sensitive documents or information you might be working on, storing in the cloud, or sending back and forth to each other.

Then there is the fact that a VPN helps make the world smaller. Let me explain. Most companies do business internationally now, and if you want to research a new client, supplier, or product, being able to source local information can be important. But often vital information can be hidden on geo-restricted websites. But a VPN enables you to access all of this information, no matter where in the world you are.

So for example, if you want to need to access geo-restricted content in Dubai, you can do so with a VPN by connected to server located in Dubai. It is as simple as that.

Using a VPN revolutionized the way my businesses protecting their own data and operated internationally, and for me that has made them an essential tool.