Today, remote work is common practice. The Telework and Hybrid Organisations 2022 barometer carried out by Malakoff Humanis reveals that 38% of private sector employees were working from home at the end of 2021. Today, more and more employees work from home several times a week or a month.
It is essential to provide your employees with tools to work from home to ensure they are as efficient and productive at home as in the office. It’s important to foster collaboration and communication between remote teams.
Here’s a list of 5 must-have tools for effective teleworking.
1. Project management software
In order for your employees to be productive while working from home, it is essential that they know their goals and the tasks they need to accomplish each day. A project management software like Wimi is the ideal tool because it centralises all the functionalities your team needs to effectively manage their projects from a distance
Therefore, you have :
- a task manager to clearly visualise all the tasks of your project, their deadline, their status and who is responsible for them;
- Shared calendars to keep track of key project events and the availability of your team members;
- an online co-editing tool to allow several people to work on the same file;
- online storage to centralise and share your documents easily;
- a reporting tool to monitor the progress and performance of your team;
- an integrated chat and video conferencing solution for easy communication with your team members.
With project management software, you have a better view of the project’s progress, you are better organised, and you work more easily as a team despite the distance.
2. Instant messaging
When working remotely, it is important to communicate regularly with your team members to maintain team cohesion, encourage collaboration, and avoid isolation.
To stay in touch throughout the day, instant messaging (or chat) is much more efficient than email, but also more secure and spam-free. Tools such as Slack, Typetalk or Google Chat can help foster internal communication between employees and/or team members and increase team responsiveness. You can also easily share documents and multimedia files, and even exchange with your customers and suppliers. Finally, it is possible to create chat channels to centralise all exchanges, people and files concerning a project for ease of use.
The purpose of instant messaging is to ‘remove’ the distance between collaborators and facilitate the sharing of information as if they were working next to each other. This tool can also be used to strengthen team cohesion, by creating more personal discussions, organising photo challenges or quizzes, etc.
3. A video conferencing system
Sometimes there is nothing like a face-to-face discussion. When you work remotely, you need to be able to talk to your partner(s) and see them. While the telephone is still practical, a video conferencing tool is essential for organising meetings with remote employees.
Today, there are many solutions for organising, facilitating and analysing all types of virtual events such as webinars, online training, brainstorming, interviews, etc. Zoom, Livestorm or Klaxoon are some of the video communication platforms available.
A video conferencing system allows you to host multiple participants and design interactive meetings where you can exchange notes, collaborate simultaneously on a whiteboard or share your work screens. You can even personalise your invitations, record your meetings and send out surveys for feedback.
4. Storage space
To be effective when teleworking, your employees need quick and easy access to all their work files and documents. For this, you need to provide them with a secure online storage platform. This way, all documents will be centralised in a single space that they can access at any time and from any connected device. Dropbox, pCloud or Google Drive are some of the best tools for storing your files online.
This type of tool also makes it easier to send and receive large files. In addition, storage spaces are usually equipped with “search” and “filter” functions that allow you to find your files quickly, thus saving time. Finally, you can control access to documents and invite outsiders (customers, suppliers, service providers, etc.) to read or modify a particular file.
By associating the storage space with a collaborative office suite, you will be able to collaborate with several people at the same time on the same document (co-editing), you will always have access to the latest version of a file, and the history of modifications will be archived.
5. A corporate social network
In a company, internal communication is very important to strengthen the commitment, the feeling of belonging and the motivation of employees. A corporate social network (CSN) is an essential tool to ensure that your remote employees are well connected to each other and to the company. With a CSN such as Whaller, Talkspirit or Jamespot, your teleworking employees stay informed on a daily basis about company news (recruitment, projects, events etc.).
This tool works like traditional social networks, except that it is private and only accessible to the company’s employees (and possibly to its external partners). It is very useful for uniting employees, developing your corporate culture and maintaining team cohesion. Your employees can post content, comment, share, follow employees and create professional or personal discussion groups.
With the news feed, your remote team members follow the information that interests them and are aware of everything that is happening within the team and the organisation. The CSR also helps to break down hierarchical barriers and allows employees to easily interact with anyone in the organisation. It is an indispensable tool for dispersed and/or hybrid teams.
So, do you already use all or some of these tools?
