Nowadays, remote working or work from home has become the need of the hour by most of the companies because of the COVID-19 outbreak. It is affecting the lives of millions of people and businesses worldwide. Embracing remote work and virtual collaboration are the most impactful strategies companies can adopt to fight against the increasing complexity of the current public health and economic crisis. Implementing effective work from the home strategy will aid businesses to achieve their targets and deliver results efficiently. Remote from home productivity tools will come handy in such situations and hence essential for every business.

Working from home can be beneficial for every business if they are managed well. Some of the benefits will consist of:

• Helps in collaborating with team members spread out across different countries
• Helps in saving time in commuting
• Helps in improving work-life balance
• Helps in cutting on office space expenses
• Helps in working within your comfort zone

Top 8 Remote Work Tools for Teams to Stay Connected

Making use of collaboration and communication tools, teams will stay connected and productive. Let’s review some of the best work from home tools that will help you stay connected with your teams and maintain high levels of productivity and collaboration. These best remote productivity tools will help your employees stay productive without hampering their effectiveness and efficiency while working from home. In such difficult times, where governments of different countries have advised to maintain social distancing, it is suggested that businesses should make use of “best remote working tools” to make the best out of such intricate situations and come out stronger and better.

1. G Suite

Also known as Google Suite, it’s a collection of different apps accessible on a cloud storage platform. Since all your data gets stored in the cloud, you get plenty of storage on your Mac/PC. All these apps can be accessed on the Google Cloud Platform, which offers the highest security.

• Sharing documents: Documents, presentations, and spreadsheets can be stored and shared with other team members. 
• Google Meet: Teams can easily create and join high-quality unlimited meetings video meetings up to 250 people.
• Work on documents concurrently: It allows multiple teams to work on the same documents at the same time.

2. Skype

It’s the best communication tool to conduct video and voice calls designed for remote teams, virtual business conferences, and webinars. The best part is meetings can be recorded with this tool.

• Call Phones: Call landline and mobiles from any part of the world
• Screen Sharing: Easily share presentations, videos, and photos with multiple people on both desktop and mobile
• Call Recording: Record important meetings and share it with your team 

3. Slack

It’s one of the best instant messaging tools to connect with remote teams. The conversations are carried out on different channels to manage teams effectively. It supports desktop enabled notifications and conversations are managed in the form of threads.

• Statuses: Users can set their status from the given options or even customize it
• File Sharing: Supports drag-and-drop file sharing feature for PDFs, images, videos, and other file types
• Voice & Video Calls: Both voice and video calls can be made within Slack

4. Zonka Feedback

It’s an industry renowned customer and employee feedback software and survey app that is used to collect actionable feedback. Monitor every feedback and get a comprehensive report and schedule them to get to your inbox. Moreover get detailed NPS, CSAT, and CES reports instantly on dashboards.

• Multiple Channel Support: Supports multiple channels like iPad, kiosks, & android devices, surveys, sms, and online surveys
• Multi Lingual Survey Builder: Surveys can be created with 30+ languages and wide range of 20+question types
• Real-time SMS & Email Alerts: Get real-time alerts as soon as you receive a feedback. Get weekly or monthly digests to the inbox

5. Toggl

It is a time-tracking app that works in the background while you work on the assigned tasks. It will capture the exact time spent to finish a particular task. It is used to enhance productivity. It is an indispensable tool to ensure tasks are completed on time, and projects are generating revenue for the time spent.

• Time Tracking Tool: Captures how much time teams or individuals are taking to finish a task
• Boost Profits: Keeps track of the charges for the completed projects
• Cross-platform: It is compatible with all the OS and can be accessed online

Also Read :Top 9 Tips for Managers to Manage Work From Home

6. Monday

It’s a wonderful project management tool designed for digital teams. Tasks can be easily created and assigned to team members. Different statuses are available in the application like “Not started”, “Working on it”, “Stuck”, and “Done” and it can be visible by managers and respective team members.

• Project Management: It’s an advanced management tool that helps team members to achieve to keep track of their targets
• Views: It’s an incredible feature that allows users to have multiple views of project overviews, timelines, workflows, and reports.
• Track Progress: Teams can work on multiple projects and keep track of the progress

7. TimeCamp

Modern businesses require modern solutions like automatic work tracking for employees, like TimeCamp. It helps companies get rid of papers and stops wasting time on unproductive manual spreadsheets filling to report the work time. It tracks work hours in the background and automatically adds new time entries or/and daily activity to each user’s timesheet, making the time reporting process easier and more efficient. 

• Wide range of reports - TimeCamp is packed with both built-in and custom reports, that allows both managers and employees to analyze their performance, 
• Integrations - the tool integrates directly with 30+ project management, sales, accounting, etc. tools, 
• Attendance management - manage employees’ absence and streamline the payroll, 

8. Zappy

It’s an all-in-one and fastest application to share screenshots, GIFs, and recordings. It provides a seamless experience and people use it to communicate with their teammates.

• Choose your Shortcut: Select your own keyboard shortcut and do click and drag to select any area of your screen. It provides fast
• Compatible with Different Apps: Screenshots are compatible with numerous applications like G Suite, Slack, Microsoft teams etc.
• Highlight with Annotations: Make use of colorful text, arrows, and drawings in couple of clicks to communicate visually.