According to a Gallup survey from 2017, over 40 percent of American employees spend at least some of their work week at home working remotely. If you’re able to offer your employees the opportunity to work from home full-time or even just part of the time, it can benefit both you and your employees because they are more likely to work hard and stay productive.
While remote employment will continue to become more popular and it’s becoming more common for small businesses and big corporations alike, you need to be able to keep your remote team working as well as they would in the workplace. Here are some online tools that are easy for your employees to use and can help keep your business running smoothly and successfully.
Keeping In Touch
When you have a team of employees working from home, it can be nearly impossible to get everyone together, face-to-face, for a meeting especially if you have employees that don’t live nearby your office headquarters. While email is often an effective and quick way to stay in touch, some stuff can get “lost in translation,” and some recipients may be kept out of the loop.
Scheduling a video conference with all of your employees can be a great way to connect and make sure everyone is on the same page. Skype is one of the most popular ways to stay in touch with others because it’s available to download on your PC and mobile devices (and it’s also free). Google Hangouts and Viber are some other popular options that are easy for every employee to use.
Confidential and Secure
Regardless if your remote employees are storing customer data on their computers or some top secret plans for your next business deal, you need to make sure that each employee has a secure computer.
Most computers and devices come with some basic anti-virus software, which can do an adequate job but doesn’t guarantee that it’s immune from being compromised by a tech-savvy hacker. Whether you need new antivirus software or just want a little added security, setting up all work-related computers and devices with worry-free software from a service like TotalAv.com, that you can trust is always a good idea.
In addition to having trustworthy security software, always take the time to take about confidentiality with your employees and encourage them to use strong passwords and use other tools such as ad blocking browser extensions.
Organization and Productivity
If you want your team of employees to work happily and successfully from home, you need to make sure they stay organized and productive. While organization and productivity are two different things in a successful business, you can’t have one without another.
Emails and video conferencing aren’t necessarily enough to keep your team a “well-oiled machine.” When people work remotely, they need clear instructions and an easy way to communicate as well as show progress.
Depending on your work atmosphere, you may benefit from more “casual” productivity software like Slack while bigger, more formal projects might work better with BaseCamp or Teamwork.com.
One of the nice things about this type of software is that it can be customized for each employee or as a group. You can enable settings for a group chat or make tasks private. With this kind of software, there should never be any questions or difficulty of staying “on task.”
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