More companies than ever are starting to employ a remote workforce. Some of them are going all in, with every one of their employees working remotely. Others have a hybrid model, where some of their employees do remote tasks while others work from a centralized location.
If you have gone to a remote workforce for your business, you should know that technology exists that can help you. We’ll talk about a few examples of that in the following article. Maybe you’re using some of this tech already, but if you aren’t, you should consider it.
Slack
The average small-to-medium-sized business has a 30% remote workforce right now. Don’t let it surprise you if this number goes up as the year’s pass. The pandemic’s arrival made remote work more attractive for many companies, but even before Covid-19, some industries were moving in that direction.
Slack is one technology example that can help your remote workforce. It is a communications application. Communication among your remote workers is critical, and Slack is one of the best apps to assist you in this area.
Slack can help remote workers feel included, so they don’t feel isolated, even if they’re not actually spending time among other employees with whom they have relationships. Slack allows workers to bring issues up for discussion that might impact the whole company.
Your workers can use it to talk about topics that you might not cover in whole-company meetings. You can respond quickly to their questions or concerns via the fast-messaging feature.
Your workers can also put on the “do not disturb” function if they’re working on a project and can’t communicate. If they have Slack going in the background while they work, they can turn this feature off when they’re ready to receive and send messages again.
Zoom
Zoom is a way for you to have regular meetings with anyone in your company. You can do company-wide meetings every day if you need them, or you can have them only with specific departments, like HR or your R and D team.
Zoom is easy to learn how to use, so even those who don’t do all that well with technology should master it quickly. You can customize your Zoom features if there are ones your workers seem to like more than others.
You might have Zoom meetings only when you’re announcing a new project or when you need an update on one. This app lets you have a free information exchange, so ideas can flow back and forth throughout the corporate ladder.
Asana
Asana is an app where you can assign your workers virtual “to do” lists. You might make those up at the start of a workweek or whenever you get a new client. You can then send each list to the appropriate department or team member.
Asana lets your team members know when a project is due or when you expect to review it. It’s a way they can keep careful track of the deadlines you assign them.
You can set up daily goals with it, or you can do weekly or monthly ones. If someone takes care of their tasks on time using Asana, you’ll know they’re a valuable team member. You might assign them more work, promote them, or give them raises as the situation dictates.
G Suite
Google is much more than just a simple search engine. The company has developed some excellent tools over the years, and G Suite is just the latest one.
You can use it to chat and do video conferencing, but it also has many more functionalities that you can explore. There are various productivity boosters that you can implement that should help your workers stay focused and on target, even if you don’t communicate with them every day.
With G Suite, you can give every one of your workers a professional email address on the same platform. That makes sending out mass emails much easier since you can be sure you’re not leaving anyone out.
You can use it for cloud storage purposes, so you don’t need to use physical servers. Flexible user account management means you can feature certain aspects of it on your dashboard, while you can eliminate others or move them to the background.
There are plenty more technology examples for remote workforces, but these are some of the more popular ones. Try them out today and see if they’re the right fit for your needs.
