Key Points

• Good tools for remote work can make your team more productive.
• You’ll need a solid means of communicating with your team.
• Tools that encourage collaboration can be a way of maintaining team cohesion.

What are the best tools for remote teams? You can often skip several of the latest and greatest software tools for in-person positions. However, remote teams have specific technological needs, partly thanks to the distance between employees and the workplace. As such, tools come in handy for managing time, communicating, keeping track of work, and so forth.

With that in mind, we’re going to explore some of the latest and greatest tools used by remote workers today. Some of these are the usual suspects, but others can be a great boon to your team. If you’ve been looking for that extra little bit to get your remote team even more productive, then you might be in luck.

The Needs of a Remote Team

Think for a moment about what defines a remote team. We often think of remote teams as being composed of individuals operating out of coffee shops, cafes, and so forth. While there is some truth to this idea, that isn’t the whole picture. Remote work is flexible and robust, but it requires some special considerations to truly excel.

Leadership for remote teams needs to focus on minimizing the concept of distance throughout the process. While your team members might be separated by hundreds of miles, it is up to you to make it feel like they are all part of the same cohesive team. Now, you can’t rightly do this with the likes of email and the occasional Citrix invite.

This is where the tools of remote work come in handy. With the right sort of tools, you’ve got the means to cover all your bases as far as your team goes. Being well-versed in the use and implementation of most of the pieces of software covered today can have your remote team working just as efficiently as the likes of an in-office team.

Why Technology Rules the Roost

We can get by with low-tech solutions when it comes to the office. Meetings are readily handled in a room with a table and chairs. Communication with employees can be as simple as just swinging by their desks to ask a question. However, when you place distance between team leader and team member, you’ll need solutions.

This is where technology plays a key role in tools for remote teams. Digital tools might lack the intimacy of something like an in-person meeting, but they can convey the same message and intent. Technology is what enables remote work to function in the first place.

As such, it is key for any team with remote members to focus on developing the right sort of infrastructure internally to deal with the issue of distance. It isn’t so much a matter of trying to bring your remote team to parity with in-person elements. Rather, it is about minimizing the distance, keeping lines of communication open, and ultimately maintaining cohesion with your team.

The Best Tools for Remote Teams

Now that we’ve outlined the needs and challenges of remote work, it’s time to discuss the tools of the trade. The best tools for remote teams aren’t catch-alls, but rather purpose-built. You don’t go out and think a multi-tool is going to help you assemble a chair, after all. As such, some of the tools we’ll focus on today are built with one thing in mind.

Sure, they can deviate from this idea and take on some additional functionality. However, at their core, these are tools designed to do one thing and do it well. As such, you’ll want to use a few of these to make the most of your remote team’s overall cohesion.

Communication, collaboration, and staying on track are some of the biggest challenges to overcome in remote work. Speaking from personal experience, having the right tools for the job can make for a productive and intuitive environment for any remote worker looking to increase the quality of their output.

Slack

You can’t talk about the best tools for remote teams without some mention of Slack. Slack is one of the leading communications tools for teams around the world and for good reason. With desktop, mobile, and web apps available, Slack allows you and your team to stay connected, no matter where they might end up.

Further, it allows team leaders to define spaces, making for the effective management of multiple teams at the same time. You can also pin important documents, schedule voice calls, and a fair bit more when you get right down to it.

However, the most important aspect of Slack is that the chat messaging works without a hitch. If you’re relying on the likes of asynchronous or real-time communication, this one tool you want to have at the ready no matter your industry. I’ve used Slack for years at this point, and I remain impressed by its overall tight efficiency and ease of use.

Notion

Often, the best tools for remote work are about establishing a knowledge base. Many organizations operate off the concept of institutional knowledge. Often, there are more senior members of staff who embody the ethos, standards, and practices of the work needed by a specific department. However, that isn’t much of a consideration when doing remote work.

That’s where Notion comes in handy. This allows you or members of leadership to draft up and establish a company wiki. It might not serve as a replacement for the more senior members of your staff instructing new hires, but it’ll get quite close. Notion supports the likes of employee handbooks, operational procedures, frequently asked questions, and so much more.

You could ostensibly use something like Microsoft Teams, which combines the functionality of a few of the tools in this list. However, Notion is lightweight and straight to the point. Further, you can point to these internally developed resources to remote team members even if they have to access things off a mobile device.

Todoist

When you want to keep on task, having an itemized list can certainly help with that. As such, one of the best tools for remote teams is Todoist, a virtual to-do list. Todoist is fairly flexible, allowing team leaders to get up and running in no time when delegating tasks to their team members.

You can take tasks and break them down into further subtasks if needed. Best of all, Todoist is rather simple to get to grips with. Some task or project management tools require a bit of reading before you get going. However, Todoist just simply lets you get to grips with what matters in a few seconds.

If you’re looking for a simple, by-the-numbers means of delegating tasks to your crew, Todoist might just be what you need. I love its quick nature, as it allows anyone, regardless of tech prowess, to get to work creating tasks in a matter of a few clicks.

Asana

Need something a little more robust than Todoist? I’ve got just what you need. Asana is an industry-leading project management software suite that has seen use in quite a few industries. Asana goes above and beyond when it comes to constructing projects. You’ve got the ability to mark milestones, create goals, and so forth.

Asana isn’t for the faint of heart, however, requiring a good bit of learning before you’re fully comfortable with its workings. If a little bit of groundwork doesn’t bother you, however, then you’re in for one of the best tools for remote work today.

Another suitable alternative for Asana is Trello, but I feel like there’s enough overlap to point toward Asana. Asana has more tools and documentation readily available for managing projects. Trello, while a solid choice, might be superfluous if you’re already running Todoist.

Loom

Ever needed to connect to an employee to show them how to do a task, but struggling to figure out how? You might need Loom. Loom is a video service that allows for screen recording and asynchronous communication. While it pales in real-time communication, at least compared to something like Zoom or Citrix.

However, you might have team members in different time zones. This is where Loom comes in handy. You can even record the likes of meetings to keep your team on track. Sharing is a mouse click away and you can share it on platforms like Slack, or an email client of your choice.

Loom is one of the best tools for remote work you’ll find, at least if you’re looking to bring some multimedia into your presentations to teams. Screen recording is a true lifesaver, especially if you’re doing extensive work on complicated interfaces.

Zoom

Zoom has been one of the wildest success stories from the pandemic and one that continues to find a place in businesses today. At its core, Zoom is a video teleconferencing tool, similar in scope to the likes of Microsoft Teams or Citrix. However, Zoom is flexible, easy to use, and runs on just about everything.

If you’ve got team members without easy access to a webcam, this might be just what you need to get them involved in meetings. Zoom is also a great tool for conducting interviews with remote candidates or just connecting with team members.

I struggle to think of a business that isn’t using Zoom in some capacity these days. It is one of the best success stories in software for a good reason. If you’re not using this already, now is just as good as any time to get started.

Google Workspace

I know some people will champion the likes of Microsoft Office 365 for this, but hear me out. Google Workspace is Google’s premium business offering for the likes of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Now, for most users, this is just a suitable free alternative to the likes of the Microsoft Office suite for single-user use cases.

G Suite allows users to collaborate with relative ease, however. Doing so is simply a matter of inviting another user to the same session and allowing them to use read/write permissions. This makes for a quick and effective collaborative space.

When coupled with something like Slack, you’ve got a truly powerful combination. As such, this is one of the overall best tools for remote work. You’re likely going to be using office software in the first place, but getting something with additional functionality is always a good thing.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for some additional tips and tricks? You might be interested to see the trends and predictions for remote work going into the new year. Remote work has firmly entrenched itself in the business landscape, and we look at some of the top predictions it faces going into 2025.

Additionally, you might want to consider how to maintain company culture while leading remote teams. Company culture can be an important way of enforcing the ethos and standards of your organization. Our article on the subject provides some helpful pointers to make sure you’re not letting that culture slip.

Conclusion

Finding the best tools for remote work depends primarily on the needs of your team. However, there are a few core staples in making sure you’re developing an effective and productive workforce. Hopefully, you come away from today’s article with some helpful new tools to supercharge your remote team’s performance.

The image featured at the top of this post is ©Sun Shock/Shutterstock.com.