Updated June 2022
As a startup, we believed that the best formula for success was having our team constantly engage with the projects we were developing while being present in our offices. Sadly, it took a global pandemic to teach us how wrong we were.
2021 was fatal for many small businesses that relied on in-person operations, but fortunately, those who were able to find the proper means to transfer their activities online, managed to survive. For some, including us, the transition meant a surprising increase in traffic and revenue.
What we learned during these trying times, was that the internet currently offers a plethora of amazing online tools and services that can make remote work and project management more efficient than ever before.
We discovered several tools that enabled us to manage our projects better, gave our employees an opportunity to organize their work hours, improve their performance, and much more.
As a result, we were able to completely ditch our offices (saved us a ton of money!) and streamline our processes. The outcome is evident – our employees and bank accounts have never been any happier.
Therefore, we decided to compile a list of the 13 best tools that anyone can take advantage of in order to perform better while working remotely.
Let’s dive into each and see why they deserved the mention.
Basecamp
Basecamp is one of the most popular services among startups, primarily because of its compact functionality to efficiently manage teams.
It features a clean design with a pretty straightforward interface where you can enable your whole team to meaningfully communicate with your clients.
Basecamp offers a variety of useful tools for project management, from creating to-dos and assigning tasks with deadlines, to sharing files and discussing important milestones.
Management and team leaders can constantly post updates to keep everyone in the loop. Tracking progress is also available through an elegant calendar feature where scheduling events is super easy.
Trello
Recognized for its signature bulletin boards, Trello provides teams with the opportunity to develop projects by implementing lists and cards.
Cards are a creative way to assign tasks and provide notes and attachments to a team member, and apparently, they work great to increase employees’ productivity.
This flexible approach makes project prioritization and completion highly achievable. Behind all of the fun and simplicity of Trello’s methods lies an incredible task management and organizational structure.
Its bulletin boards mechanism is very effective and can turn your ideas into action in a matter of seconds.
Trello’s cornerstone is streamlining workflow, as the platform excels at helping you turn your “to-dos” into “done” in no time.
Monday
The third and final project management tool on our list is Monday. We decided to include it here because its organizational approach is different from Basecamp and Trello, but still simple and effective.
Monday uses the Kanban method to improve workflow across your teams – tasks aren’t assigned when new work arrives, but as capacity permits. For example, a content writer will be assigned a new article from the queue as soon as they’re finished with what they’re currently working on.
The nice thing about Monday’s platform is the visual experience of the whole workflow and the opportunity that everyone gets to see who’s working on what and offer their assistance.
Impraise
Impraise is a tool that will change the way remote teams stay connected and engaged. It’s an intuitive platform that helps in creating a culture where every employee feels coordinated and connected.
The service is great for preparing one-on-one meetings with team members and sharing ideas and agendas, ensuring nothing is left out. Additionally, Impraise includes a great OKR feature – a tool for managers to set challenging tasks that turn into measurable goals.
Ultimately, what makes Impraise really awesome is its ability to exchange feedback and get a better understanding of each other. This is very important with remote teams, since their ability to communicate is usually limited without the proper tool.
MindMeister
Mind Mapping is one of the fundamental mechanisms for thriving workflow. Turning ideas into visualized structured information helps with defining the overall scope of your projects and analyzing each of the components that you’ll be working with.
MindMeister is a cloud-based platform that does an incredible job at project planning and mind mapping. With MindMeister, each employee can collaborate and share their ideas in real time, from the comforts of their homes.
The platform offers a beautiful interface to represent your projects’ hierarchies, where team members can comment on every arising topic and vote on proposed ideas.
Venngage
Presenting your data in an interesting and engaging way always works wonders for team productivity. Infographics make processes and data memorable and accessible and finding the proper tool to create them can be a game changer for many businesses.
Enter Venngage – a popular template and infographic designing tool that makes it so much easier to tell your story and get your message across. With it, you can create visually stunning standard operating procedures and onboarding templates, business infographics, remote teamwork guidelines, and even videos with Canva’s video editor.
You don’t have to be a designer to create visually compelling infographics with Venngage. Additionally, you can upload your brand’s logo, color schemes, and fonts, to keep consistent with your brand.
MockPlus
Prototyping a product holds an incredible value for a business as it allows the company to perform all the necessary tests before it moves to production. This is especially important for startups because it saves them tons of money and time.
MockPlus is one of the most powerful all-in-one product prototyping platforms that includes project collaboration and design systems as well. With MockPlus, no matter where your employees are located, they can cooperate and build your designs as one.
Creating prototypes with rich animations and transitions is straightforward with MockPlus, since its drag-and-drop editor allows quick interaction between all of the icons and components it provides.
Salesforce
Salesforce has been the world’s number one customer relationship management tool for quite some time and we have no reason to believe that’s going to change anytime soon.
The platform is cloud-based and works great for evaluating customers from every aspect. Thousands of companies use it to skyrocket their business growth since Salesforce offers state-of-the-art sales streamlining, AI-powered customer interactions, fast customer support, and much more.
Salesforce is very suitable for remote workers, as sales teams can sell and close deals with it – from anywhere. Staying up to date with important developments in your company as they happen is what makes Salesforce the most attractive among CRM tools.
Serene
Working from home isn’t always as appealing as it sounds. Distractions are everywhere and sometimes what seem a few simple tasks can take up your whole day. This is where Serene comes in!
Serene is a productivity tool for maximizing efficiency by eliminating multitasking. At Serene, they believe that focusing on one goal per day works much better than dedicating your attention to multiple objectives.
The app is currently only available on macOS, but it’s soon coming to Windows too. It’s great for blocking out distractions and team members who use it love how focused they’ve become since they got on it.
The most important features that Serene offers are website and app blockers, phone silencer, day planner, focus music, session timer, etc.
Heroku
Heroku represents a top-notch cloud-based software development solution. It’s a fantastic PaaS platform most suitable for startups because of its scalable pricing system, and it even offers a free version.
Building, operating, and deploying apps with Heroku is an experience remote developers dream of. They take care of all the infrastructure and services, while your team members simply log in and dedicate their skills on creating the finest apps.
Developers adore Heroku because of the freedom it provides – they are free to choose the programming languages, databases, and services they are accustomed to.
TeamViewer
Don’t you simply love it when you’re on a screen-sharing meeting with a colleague and they can’t figure out how to perform even the simplest of your instructions? Yeah, we neither! You don’t have to endure that kind of suffering any longer because TeamViewer can put you in charge.
TeamViewer provides you with consensual access to someone else’s device, remotely, safely, and with great confidence. No matter where they’re located, you can access your clients’ devices and fix their issues in no time.
Each connection with TeamViewer is supported by a two-factor authentication and you can also use the service for file transfer.
Canva
Canva can satisfy all of your creative needs without the requirement of hiring a Photoshop professional. With it, you can create stunning documents and designs and produce high-impact social media graphics and extremely effective marketing promos.
It’s even great for teamwork as it provides view or edit access to designs, so everyone can mutually contribute and comment with their ideas.
Besides the premium stock image library they offer, Canva’s incredibly intuitive tool uses an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, is highly customizable, and features multi-channel campaign management that works great for reaching a global audience.
WooBoard
No business owner should leave their employees without any recognition for their good work. There’s no excuse for that, especially with WooBoard available within easy reach.
WooBoard is an online platform for celebrating wins and showing gratitude to the employees who excelled with their hard-working performance. Creating a positive culture of recognition is something that’s very necessary even for remote teams, as it boosts morale and increases their motivation.
WooBoard makes it simple to celebrate even small goals, such as meeting a deadline or receiving positive feedback from a client. You can allocate points or badges to the most deserving team members, and that’s great for boosting jubilation and encouraging conversations.
At the end of the day, recognition reminds employees that their efforts don’t go unnoticed and that your company’s goals are worth striving for.
CallHippo
CallHippo offers a comprehensive business phone service, including call forwarding to your phone, conference calls, and the ability to stay in touch no matter where you are in the world.
It also offers the option of choosing your telephony provider, ensuring clear and crisp lines, call queuing automation, as well as call barging, recording, and voicemail.
Streamline the tasks of your customer service department with a virtual phone system, wherever your agents are located in the world.
Indy
Indy is an all-in-one admin platform geared to help freelancers manage every aspect of their business. It’s affordable, it offers an amazing array of integrated features, and it’s supported by a dedicated team of professionals.
When you’re responsible for as many things as freelancers are, administration can get pretty overwhelming. Sure, software makes things easier. But the number of different tools you’d need to stay on top of tasks like customer relationship management, calendar scheduling, asset management, and invoicing can start to spiral out of control.
Indy is all of these things, and more, with one convenient entry point.
Start our Free plan today and take full control of your independent business from start to finish.
Webwork Time Tracker
Remote work calls for the use of time trackers, that’s for sure. How else do managers and employers know if their employees work during work hours or not?
WebWork is a time tracker and employee monitoring tool that’s largely used by remote teams.
It enables the employer to have an idea of their employees’ work process. Features like screenshots and app & website usage give a complete view of the user’s work process.
WebWork benefits freelancers and employees as well. Freelancers use it for tracking their work hours so that they can be paid accurately per hour. Employees get to have a visual representation of their worked hours and can easily find out time wasters in their routine.
Conclusion
We’re glad you went all the way through our curated list of the 13 best tools that make remote work easier and more productive.
In this article we made the effort to include all sorts of tools that remote workers can find useful for the projects they work on.
We ensured this list contains tools for project management, tools that help with meetings and feedback exchange, mind mapping, product prototyping, creating graphic designs and infographics, app development, remote control, and even something to help celebrate your company’s success.
We hope you’re already on your way to test a tool or two and we’re sure you’ll end up using at least one of them. Good luck!