In recent years, a lot has changed, including the way we work. Technology has played a remarkable role in these shifting trends. Employees are now working remotely in a distributed fashion, especially after the first quarter of 2020 when the pandemic put the world to a standstill. It is worth noting that employees who work from home are 22% happier than those who work from the office, according to a survey report conducted by Owl labs. Some employees are, however, split between working at the office and working from home in what is known as a hybrid work model.
The bottom line is that the trend is expected to keep gaining traction in the coming years. In fact, it is estimated that 22%, which roughly translates to around 36.2 million Americans, will be working remotely by 2025. This is why as a business, you need to invest in the right remote work tools to tap into the benefits. Talking of being prepared, here is a list of essential tools to facilitate hybrid working:
What Exactly Are Remote Work Tools?
Remote work tools are essentially digital software and programs that help remote workers transact, collaborate, communicate and accomplish work together as a team. Simply put, it allows employees to work together from anywhere across the world. It was born out of the growing adoption of remote work and a hybrid model, where employees can do their jobs in-office or from distributed locations other than the central office.
Top Remote Work Tools to Have:
RemoteToPC
The RemoteToPC is a wonderful Remote pc viewer tool that helps businesses provide remote support and IT management. For example, this tool gives you remote access to your office PC. With Remote login to pc access, everything on a target computer can be accessed virtually- from anywhere in the world. You can use it to grab a locally saved file, check something quickly from your remote PC, or take remote control of a colleague’s computer when they need help.
You can enjoy Remote access to pc with advanced features like an end to end encryption, double password protection, and a two-factor authentication web login. The beauty is that RemoteToPC software has a number of plans depending on your business size and desired features, which are pretty affordable. For example, you can go for the enterprise level for corporate and IT remote access, which allows unlimited additional user accounts.
Additionally, it provides unattended remote PC access for hundred-plus computers and gives you the power to limit users’ access to specific computers. Your business IT team can provide remote PC access management along with support, alerts, and PC health monitoring. Also, with a Remote PC viewer, you can secure remote login to pc through a web browser which is an ideal solution for accessing your remote computers without any software installation.
It is excellent software to provide everyone in the office with secure remote access!
Zoom
Zoom is a remote video conferencing service that has become quite popular in the last few years. It keeps your team connected through phone calls, conference rooms, and video chat. It also provides video webinars, online meetings, file sharing, and cross-platform messaging. Collaborative features such as whiteboard and simultaneous screen sharing are also available.
Zoom offers HD video and voice, gallery view, full screen, and Outlook and Chrome plugins, all for free. It can host up to one hundred participants and unlimited one-on-one meetings where a group of three or even more can meet for 40 minutes with the free plan, which many companies find limiting. However, with the paid plan, there’s unlimited meeting time. The paid program supports streaming on social media and cloud storage of meetings. Zoom supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS operating systems.
Fyle
Fyle is a cloud-based software that helps you manage your expenses as a company by taking care of the repetitive mundane tasks, thus allowing employees to focus on tasks that matter more. Fyle codes and extracts data from expense receipts using an AI-powered data extraction machine. Thus, it is more accurate and significantly eliminates the manual reconciliation of receipts.
Traditionally, expense reporting takes hours and hours, but with this software, the time used reduces drastically. The finance, accounting team, and general employees can access and view their business expenses under one dashboard.
The receipts are submitted from Microsoft teams, email forwarding, slack, text messaging, Outlook, Gmail, and the Fyle mobile app. Fyle is an excellent software as it gives management a glimpse of their financial operations, thus making Fyle a recommendable tool.
Slack
Slack is a platform that allows real-time file sharing, instant messaging, and collaboration used across the company for simplified communication. The conversations are broken down into shared channels, thus simplifying teamwork and allowing organizations to communicate with team members worldwide.
Further, somebody can use the channels to chat and send individual messages to employees and co-workers. Video and voice call also enable face-to-face communication to feel like a walk in the park. Slack has up to ten integrations with other apps, such as Office 365 and Google Drive.
HubSpot
HubSpot meetings give you a chance to sync your calendar with the platform. Hence, it allows your employees and customers to schedule appointments with you.
Users can save contact information using the form fields on your meeting page. Additionally, somebody can send the meeting page by embedding it on a website or send it as a link by email. You can get started with free HubSpot and have access to unlimited meetings.
Google Drive
This Google cloud service allows you to share, sync, store, and access your files across any device, allowing individuals to view and update them from anywhere. The files are held in one centralized location. Also, It integrates with other google applications such as Drawings, Sheets, Slides, Google Forms, and Docs. Google Drive allows you to save email attachments in one workspace. The personal plan has a capacity of free 15GB of cloud storage, which fills up quickly.
Zapier
Zapier is an automation tool that automatically combines two or more web apps to take advantage of their functionalities. Zapier is a nice tool that can elevate your employee productivity. You can turn emails you get into to-dos on task management apps like Trello, Tallyfy, Asana, Airtable, and the like. You can also save your mail attachments directly to any cloud storage provider like Dropbox or G Drive. You could also assign tasks to your employees from your email. It also allows you to send automatic surveys, among other workflows you could automate.
Conclusion
Remote working and especially hybrid work models are here to stay! So, make it your goal to find tools for accessing remote computers and software that can streamline and speed up your collaboration and processes for a better workplace culture in a hybrid work environment. These remote work tools are bound to maximize your team’s productivity and smoothen operations; thus, you will reap the benefits of the remote and hybrid work model.
