The “new normal” has forced businesses, small and multinational ones alike, to let a majority of their teams operate remotely.
Despite the ubiquity of digital products and services, remote working environments have stumped even the most seasoned professionals. However, there exist some robust (free) digital tools that can make remote team management and workflow drastically easier. Following is a discussion of a few tools that can help streamline work when everyone is working away from office.
Notion is a versatile application that lets you locate your teams’ or departments’ workflow in one neat place. This platform is like a workspace where you can add several team members. It allows you to create pages as per your company’s needs. This can involve making schedules, to-do lists or storing a repository of notes or links that may be useful to the team later. The application has user-friendly features that let you assign tasks to members of the workspace and maintain a track of everyone’s progress.
The cool thing about Notion is that anything can be linked with another. If you need your manager to check a proposal you wrote, simply embed/upload/link your document on the relevant page in Notion. Tag your manager, leave a comment asking him to review it and continue your work. Your manager will get a notification and check your work accordingly.
Remote team management through Notion also relives you from micromanaging each and every employee. Their tasks, deadlines and deliverables are all organized there.
Slack is channel-based communication application which means you can create separate “channels” or chats according to the purpose of the work. For example, your marketing team is working on a magazine and some members of this team are also preparing a social media campaign. You can then have separate channels for the magazine and social media campaign discussions.
In case you are not really involved in a conversation, say, a channel for discussing website design, just mute it. You won’t be bothered by the notifications anymore. If there is a message which you want to address later, just snooze it by asking Slack to remind you about it at a later time.
A great feature about Slack chats is the ability to create threads. No more do you have to scroll 50 messages back to figure what someone is referring to. Threads let you continue a conversation under one message, regardless of how many new messages have been sent.
An uncertainty that comes with remote working is knowing the activity status of the other person. This is where status messages come in handy and quite essential. If you have to attend to your kids during work hours, just update your status accordingly. Your coworkers will then know that you aren’t immediately available. In this case, you need to take statuses much more seriously than you do on Facebook.
There are video calling applications like Zoom that are in popular use by people. But it is also true that when time and productivity are of essence, these applications often cause pointless delays and interruptions. To address this efficiency problem, there are new applications like Trio and Tandem that let you conduct hassle-free team meetings without any annoying issues.
These platforms also take screen-sharing to the next level. Participants can work together on the same screen on projects like programming or writing. This helps boost workflow beyond what was achievable when people worked individually and later tried to integrate their work with others’.
Lastly, another opportunity that businesses used to overlook but are beginning to see the merits of lately is that of remote hiring. This is a sphere of work that Gaper is endeavoring to empower businesses with. If you need a software engineer, traditional hiring methods won’t apply anymore. You probably won’t even have the resources to truly assess the aptitude of a candidate. In these cases, it is prudent to let other firms hire for you. These firms have already taken costly and time-consuming steps to build teams of trained and skilled professionals.
Regardless of how you used to operate in an office setting, managers will have to accept that remote team management is now a role of the employees under you too. It may be the case that they are more well-versed than you in using a digital work tool. You should not be hesitant in letting your team be the drivers for workflow during these times; it may just be what is needed to save your business.
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