Key Points

• Remote teams rely on communication to function effectively.
• Choosing the right tools for your remote team can see massive productivity increases.
• It is crucial to keep your remote team on task and collaborating just like in the office.

What tools can boost productivity in remote teams? Finding the right workflow for remote teams is paramount to their continued success. As such, planning to use the right tools and developing a solid workflow is a great way to ensure your team stays on track. Finding the right blend can be challenging, but that’s what we’re here for.

Remote work has caught on in a big way over the last decade. While remote work has always existed in the modern era, it wasn’t until the pandemic that we saw it come into the mainstream as a major talking point. That said, you can be just as productive with remote work as you can with going into the office. Let’s dive into a few tools of the trade and get your team ready to excel.

Why Does Remote Work Work?

There have been quite a few studies on how remote teams boost productivity in the workplace. Despite what some leadership wishes, it seems that for certain industries, remote teams blow in-person teams out of the water in terms of raw productivity. Now, that doesn’t mean there is no place for in-person work, as certain industries require it.

Remote work is a great method of working for many team members. They don’t have to stress about a commute, lunch can be easily prepared and won’t run up extra costs, and there is a general sense of ease in a relaxed environment like your home.

The shift to remote work has been quite pronounced since 2020. While there has been a larger mainstream push to return to the office, many organizations are sticking with remote work for the higher net productivity and reduced cost of overhead when looking at brick-and-mortar facilities.

A Cultural Shift

Once upon a time, remote work was a pipe dream of sorts for many professionals. It was relegated to niche fields like freelance content writing, web design, and a bevy of other little professions that don’t have much in the way of a real-world footprint. As I’m sure most of you know, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 changed everything.

Businesses and schools alike moved to remote teams, in part to keep the lights on, and in part to keep paychecks flowing to their employees. When you have governments around the world telling everyone to stay home, it only stands to reason that most folks will pay attention.

The shift to remote work never truly left the conversation for many organizations. Many professions still have remote or hybrid workflows available. Employees might show up for orientation and important meetings but can work from the safety and relative comfort of their homes. Further, many organizations discovered how much they were saving not maintaining brick-and-mortar locations.

Tools to Boost Productivity in Remote Teams

Now that we’ve outlined a bit of what remote work is about, how do you boost productivity in your teams? Remote teams are just like in-person teams, needing strong leadership and a guiding hand to accomplish the tasks at hand. However, unlike in-person teams, you’re going to have to switch your strategy up a bit if you’re looking to accomplish this task.

Part of how you accomplish this is picking the right sort of tools for the job. You’re looking at a few primary categories when considering the use of any tool. Remote teams have different considerations than an in-person team after all.

As such, you’ll want to focus your efforts on solid communication pipelines, time management, project management, and collaborative tools. These all have specific functions that I’ll explain as I go along. There is a bit of overlap with some of these, but that will come down to a matter of preference for you or whatever vendors your organization uses currently.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is nothing new for the more tech-savvy readers in our audience. Replacing Microsoft’s Skype, Team is a fully integrated communication suite. Business users have access to chat, voice, and video conferencing. If you’re already in the Microsoft pipeline, it only stands to reason that you’d opt for their communications suite.

Microsoft Teams is quick enough to use for most users. However, what it has over some of the communication tools I cover later on is just an all-in-one approach. I’m generally not a fan of all-in-one packages in most scenarios, but Teams is a competent software package that has a proven track record.

If you’re looking to boost productivity in remote teams, communication is key. Without all of your team members on the same page, how can you hope to accomplish anything of note? You’ll want to keep a constant pipeline of communication between leadership and team members alike. A communicative team is a productive team, after all.

Zoom

Zoom is one of those software Cinderella stories you see once every ten years or so. Before the pandemic, it was just another video conferencing platform. However, its ease of use, relatively simple installation process, and the ability to run on just about everything made it a must-have tool for many remote teams.

For leadership looking to boost productivity in remote teams, standup meetings can be a critical component of the daily routine. Zoom facilitates that with relative ease. Starting a meeting is as simple as pressing a button on the app.

From there, you can invite members as necessary, with email reminders and the like sent to users when the meeting is about to start. Used in conjunction with Microsoft Teams, you can expect a robust and flexible communication tool that is great for the digital nomads in your workforce.

Slack

I’ve been using Slack for going on a decade at this point. I’ve used it in-person and at remote positions alike, and it is one of the key tools for any workforce in my humble opinion. If you’re looking for more specialized solutions to your communication needs, Slack is a great way of handling things.

For the older tech heads in the audience, Slack is most similar to Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, an old-fashioned chat protocol from the 1990s. Users can be assigned to specific channels, and you can link to operational documents and other tools as necessary.

It bears repeating, but communication is going to be the biggest sticking point for the success of any remote team. As such, if you’re looking to boost the productivity of remote teams, focus quite a bit on communication and the rest will fall in place.

Asana

We’re moving out of the communication suites and going toward the more bread-and-butter tools you’ll expect of any remote team. Asana is a project management suite that has seen use in several fields and has caught in a big way when it comes to remote teams. Operation is relatively simple, team leaders can manage boards and delegate tasks to team members as necessary.

One of the big pitfalls of trying to boost productivity in remote teams is finding the right balance of hands-off and guided focus. Asana can take some of the guesswork out of the process. By assigning your team members specific tasks, you’re keeping the necessary work in context.

However, you’re also giving them a longer leash to do what they need to do. There is no shortage of job management and project management software suites on the market today. That said, if you’re going to pick one, just use Asana. There is ample documentation and it has a proven track record when used by teams of all sizes.

Google Drive

When it comes to in-person work, if you need to receive a report from a worker, they can just lay it on your desk. How do you do that when the worker might be hundreds of miles from your current location? Well, you could use email, but that has its pitfalls. If you’re like me and receive hundreds to thousands of messages a day, things can get lost in the shuffle.

Google Drive and other cloud storage solutions are a staple of any remote team and a great way to boost productivity. They don’t do anything fancy compared to the other remote tools we’ve listed. You upload files and can share them between users, that’s about it.

However, Drive has been a staple of the remote workplace for years at this point. Files are vetted for safety, meaning potential viruses and malware are scanned before you download them. Managing a remote team and their IT department is going to be a headache, a simple tool like Drive can remove some of that annoyance from the equation.

Toggl

If you’re already using the likes of Asana, you could perhaps skip out on Toggl. However, I’ve found in my time on remote teams that you’ll want the means of managing your time ably. At its core, that is the main functionality behind Toggl.

Toggl functions like a time clock but has some more robust functionality behind it. You can keep an eye on the likes of productivity. Toggl also provides the means of generating reports, which can be handy for occasional meetings.

As I said, if you’re well-versed in Asana, Toggl might be unnecessary. However, it is a robust and solid tool if you’re looking for the right sort of time management utility for your remote team. Staying on track is just as important as communication when it comes time to boost productivity in your remote team.

Miro

One of the most difficult parts of collaborating in an online space is simply picking the venue. Tools like G Suite from Google are handy for collaborating on the likes of documents. However, they aren’t a great way to boost productivity in remote teams during the brainstorming stage.

So, you might want to consider Miro instead. Miro is a whiteboarding app, but that is selling it short. You can interact with other team members in real time along with integrating it into other tools. Miro readily can interface with the likes of Google Drive, Slack, and Zoom, making for a powerful software utility.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

We’ve covered quite a few tools for remote teams today, but you’re ready to keep learning aren’t you? You could look into how you build a high-performing remote team. We’ve discussed how to boost productivity, but putting the right controls in place can see your remote team shaming in-person teams when it comes to raw performance.

Additionally, you might want to take a closer look at how to implement design thinking in cross-functional teams. Design thinking is one of the more exciting product development approaches to come about in the last few decades. Learning how to develop products intuitively and naturally is going to net benefits for you and your organization.

Conclusion

When it comes time to boost productivity in your remote team, you have no shortage of options. Picking the right tools ahead of time can minimize the teething problems seen when developing new remote teams. Develop the pipelines and you’ll see a lean, mean productivity machine when it comes time to do some work.

The image featured at the top of this post is ©Ground Picture/Shutterstock.com.