Top Remote Team Management Tools — 2023
Everything you need to know to effectively manage remote workers, foster a welcoming company culture, and achieve business success in the process.
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The best remote team management tools allow companies to engage employees, collaborate, and grow their business. Remote work has been on the rise for nearly two decades, and even more so since the COVID-19 crisis. In the U.S. alone, a study revealed that remote work has increased by 28% between 2020 and 2022 - a trend that’s highly likely to continue. As such, software solutions and remote team management tools have become increasingly necessary. After all, they help companies maximize productivity, collaboration, and culture — all of which are critical for organizational success.
But as you probably already know, there are seemingly endless options. Some help companies better manage their remote teams, while others help remote workers be more productive. In this guide, we’re going to help you figure out which solutions are right for your organization with a list of top tools, what they cover, and why you might need them; common mistakes and how to fix them; implementation guidelines; and more.
Best Remote Work Software
We pride ourselves on strict editorial standards and use a thorough process to vet and review software before we publish it on the site (and in fact, most vendors we have to end up rejecting). This process includes having our team of HR and recruiting experts use the tool themselves, getting user feedback, and then evaluating the vendor on key metrics like their financial health, customer retention, and responsiveness to customer queries. You can read more about how we evaluate vendors here.
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Oyster is a well-respected name in the global employment software space, but the platform also earns its name in our top remote team management tools for being able to handle onboarding, payroll, benefits, and offboarding — simply and compliantly in 180+ countries.
PROS
- Oyster is user-friendly to both companies and employees/contractors.
- Useful native global employment tools: global hiring guides, employee cost calculator, benefits advisor, and employee misclassification analyzer. All are free of use.
- Built-in features for global hiring, payments, benefits, time off, employee management, and offboarding.
- Provides flat rates for employees and contractors.
- Nonprofits can use Oyster to hire their first full-time team members free for a year. The platform’s also free if you hire refugees where the platform has direct entities.
- Intuitive: The platform is easy to navigate and makes logical sense.
- competitively priced: The flat rate for employees and contractors makes cost comparisons simple, and is competitive in the market.
- Targeted for a remote workforce: Whether your employees are in one country or 100, Oyster can accommodate them accordingly, and this is a feature few platforms can boast.
CONS
- Local benefits packages are available as paid add-ons.
- Oyster integrates with a few popular ATS, ERP, Expense Management, HRIS, and Security tools. The good news is they’re adding more.
- A few users reported transfer delays, so that’s something to watch out for.
- No project & task management features, file sharing, and collaboration.
- The integration options are rather limited with Oyster and so there’s a chance it may not be compatible with your organization's HRIS or other software.
- A few users reported delays in transfers so that’s something to watch out for.
- If you’re looking to co-employ your employees and partially outsource HR responsibilities, Oyster isn’t for you. They are more of an Employer or Record (EOR) rather than a Professional Employer Organizations (PEO).
Oyster made a name for itself among global employment tools as a user-friendly platform that handles not only basic HR but supports businesses hiring and retaining remote talent from over 180 countries with solid packages. The platform is not the kind of tool that focuses on managing distributed teams via native communication. It is more like the tool you can rely on as your team is scaling globally, and you want to make sure your recruitment is compliant and aligned with local employment terms.
Paying global hires through Oyster is pretty simple. We especially love that the platform tracks deductions and tax payments across over 120 countries worldwide, so you don’t have to. Team members can submit their timesheets and request time off and reimbursement online for your approval. The tool even lets you add bonuses and allowances for your employees.
Signing up for an account to experience Oyster’s global employment tools (we used some, and they were in pretty good shape) is free. Setting up the software doesn’t cost you anything, either. However, to use Oyster’s local benefits packages, you must buy them as add-ons. There is also a deposit equal to one month of your total employment value due by the first month of your team members. It will be used as a security fund in case any unexpected payment issues from your end occur. It’s worth noting, though, that the deposit will be refunded once all final invoices have been paid.
We put Oyster towards our software recommended list in this guide, besides the above reasons, because we saw the improvements of the product over time. The new dashboard got a clean look, with a newborn section with critical tasks that needed your attention. The platform ensures its global employment guides stay relevant by frequently updating them. While there’s no phone support available, we can’t complain about the current support systems simply because they’re helpful and responsive.
Oyster’s customers include Quora, Wagestream, Impala, and Grover.
- Oyster Contractor starts at $29 per month per contractor.
- Oyster Employee costs $499-$699 per month per employee. The price per employee varies depending on the specific country.
- Oyster Scale has custom pricing.
- Benefits packages are offered as add-ons for Employee and Scale plans.
- It’s free to create an account and explore the platform's HR tools and resources. Fees apply once you’ve engaged a team member.
- The platforms offer special discounts for nonprofits and refugee hiring.
Best For
Distributed teams looking to hire, relocate and manage contractors and employees within Oyster’s served countries. Nonprofits, B Corporations, and teams hiring refugees would also love the platform's special discounts.
ChartHop is an organizational management platform. They're rapidly evolving into one of the more interesting HR Tech companies in the space.
PROS
- Charthop nicely integrates with your existing HR and ATS systems. Having everything under one roof means not having to use ten different applications.
- Charthop’s organization chart is its biggest asset. Their drag-and-drop feature to edit the chart is a hit amongst a majority of the users. Overall, the tool makes navigation throughout the company really easy - you can find the people you need, figure out their responsibilities, and track changes after the latest company re-organization.
- Charthop's goal tracking interface is simple, intuitive, and easy to build. There's not much else you can ask for.
- Charthop's Map feature allows businesses to see where each employee is located. For organizations that work remotely, this promotes a feeling of togetherness, which is crucial for employee engagement.
CONS
- Charthop's organization chart navigation isn't the best. The chart zooms in and out quite quickly, and the gestures aren't intuitive, making it difficult to use.
- Charthop can be a little complicated to figure out. Also, the fact that there are so many features is a little intimidating.
- Charthop's search function isn't user-friendly. There's not much information on how to use it effectively, and it sometimes throws the wrong results.
- Charthop's UI is somewhat dated and clunky.
ChartHop originally started out as an org chart software vendor. Now, they see their offering as a new category called organizational management. It is for that reason that they've added various new tools to their platform, such as people analytics and headcount planning. These tools can serve you very well when managing a remote team. For example, you can use this tool to facilitate collaboration and communication by getting everyone aligned under the same data. You can also measure the effectiveness of programs like DEI hiring, reduce attrition by identifying risks, and more.
better.com, Postman, mongoDB, Remy Cointreu
ChartHop operates on a per employee per month basis. Their base plan, called ChartHop Build, is $3.50 per employee per month. The next two plans, Grow and Scale, are $7 and $10 per employee per month respectively. They also offer an enterprise level solution with custom pricing.
For an additional $2 per employee per month, customers can get access to ChartHop’s compensation planning system as well.
Best For
Remote teams looking for a data-centric solution for team management.
Atlas stands out as a global payroll provider with a strong emphasis on employer of record (EOR) and HR services. It caters to teams of any size, offering a compelling blend of in-house expertise and a robust tech platform.
PROS
- Leverage the expansive network of direct EOR entities in over 160 countries to seamlessly hire talent worldwide.
- Benefit from a service-focused company that combines their in-house expertise with robust technology. For instance, you can conveniently onboard employees and process their payroll across various countries, guided by knowledgeable local experts, all through an online platform.
- Experience a strong focus on compliance, ensuring adherence to local labor laws and regulations.
- Atlas has legal entities in over 160 countries. They’ll help you take care of employee onboarding and payroll processing in any of those countries, eliminating the need to engage any local service providers.
- The platform simplifies how you hire, manage and pay employees and contractors abroad, without needing to set up an operation where they are located.
- Atlas helps you stay compliant with local labor laws and frees you from employer liability.
CONS
- Users have reported potential challenges in communicating with support. Involvement of experts from different countries may result in occasional delays. However, based on our user interviews, ongoing improvements are being made.
- While native integrations may not be available, Atlas provides an API to facilitate integration with other systems and applications.
- Atlas currently doesn’t offer global managed payroll for non-employer of record (EoR) clients; so if your company doesn't need Atlas to take on from you as EoR, but need to use Atlas' global payroll services, you can't do so at this time. Do note though that the team at Atlas is planning to offer this service next year.
- Atlas currently has limited prebuilt integration modules but they do offer API access for users to plug in third-party tools.
Atlas emerges as a powerful and all-encompassing global payroll and employer of record (EOR) solution, enabling businesses to acquire and remunerate talent on a global scale effortlessly. After personally experiencing a demo and trial of Atlas, we confidently assert that they are a trustworthy company to handle your legal employer obligations. With Atlas, you can efficiently oversee a significant portion of the employee lifecycle, encompassing multiple employees and diverse countries, all from a unified platform.
Atlas is used by over a thousand companies, including Toyota, CACI, Bath & Body Works, Coupa, PAE, and Namely.
- Essential: For $99 per month, this plan encompasses features and services that help users navigate the labor & employment laws in over 160 countries (+50 US States), manage employee lifecycle, compliance information between countries, be compliant with their accounting for travel and business expenses, receive personalized notifications, as well as have moderate access to expert insights and HR templates (which are priced separately).
- Premium: For $149 per month, this plan packs everything in the Essentials plan, plus compliance audit interactive checks, people analytics and planning features as well as dedicated account management.
- Enterprise: The pricing of this plan varies according to the number of purchased licenses and customer needs. You can reach out to Atlas’ Sales team for a custom price quote.
Add-ons:
- Contractor Pay: Starting at $49 per contractor per month
- Employer of Record: $595 per employee per month
- Visa & Mobility Sponsorship: Starting at $2,500 per visa
Best For
Whether you have a small or large team, Atlas delivers the ideal solution to meet your needs efficiently and effectively.
Caroo is a versatile employee gifting service. Companies can use it to reward their top-performing employees or to simply cheer all employees with company-wide gifting.
PROS
CONS
Caroo is a software-enabled employee gifting service. Companies of all sizes can use it to recognize certain employees for their performance or to simply cheer all employees with company-wide gifting. Caroo has different gift boxes to choose from; depending on the box chosen, these boxes can include anything from healthy snacks, premium gifts, and team-building activity items, delivered directly to your employees’ homes.
Google, Apple, GoodPx, Nike, Hulu, Peloton.
Caroo has 3 packages that are priced as follows:
- Nourish: The pricing of the Nourish box starts at $26.95 and is shipped for free. This box can pack up to 30 delicious snacks from innovative brands.
- Inspire + Connect: This box packs premium-themed gifts and team-building activities. The pricing of this box starts at $53.95 plus free shipping.
- Concierge: Eligible for teams of 50 or more, the Concierge box is fully customizable and can include anything from premium snacks, wine, electronics, productivity supplies and more. The pricing of this box varies according to its contents.
Caroo also has seasonal boxes that pack season-appropriate snacks. The pricing of seasonal boxes starts at $33.95 plus free shipping.
Best For
Companies of all sizes looking to reward or simply delight their employees regardless of the occasion.
Slack makes it easy for you to stay in touch with coworkers and reports through direct messages, unlimited channels, and video calls. There are more than 2,500 integrations, so you can connect most, if not all, apps you use.
PROS
- Slack offers a lot for a free plan, including unlimited users and messages. You get 10 integrations on the free plan, which may be enough for freelancers or small businesses.
- Of all the team collaboration software options available, Slack is one of the easiest to learn and use. The interface is immediately familiar for anyone who’s used a chat room. You can easily access channels, direct messages, and figure out how to use all the tools because of the simple interface.
- On paid plans, you can customize your sidebar to include only what you want to see. You can customize your notifications and set up a notification schedule to minimize disruption.
- Slack makes it easy to find a specific message, file, or comment in a channel with advanced search filters. Rather than scroll through endless results pages, you can narrow your search focus to pinpoint what you need.
- Audio clips are a convenient way to get a message to someone, but Slack made sure to include automatic transcribing for better accessibility. There’s also a dark mode to make it easier to read text and you can adjust text size with a zoom function.
- Slack is known for providing a fun atmosphere for work through a variety of emojis and gifs (just paste a link into a channel or message). You can even create custom emojis for your Slack workspace.
CONS
- Slack has a bad reputation for being distracting. There is a way to minimize the number of notifications you get, but even without active notifications, it can still be a distraction from work.
- Paid plan users don’t have to worry about decaying message history, but if you’re on the free plan, messages and files disappear after 90 days.
- Slack sometimes gets laggy or even freezes before restarting. Notifications aren’t all that reliable at times, too.
- Collaboration in Slack comes down to messaging, specific channel group chats, video conferencing, and file sharing. There is no way to work on documents or files with others in real time.
When you have a team, or even a whole company, that works from home, having remote team management software like Slack is a must. The benefit of using such a well-known program like Slack is that it has the features and support you need to effectively run a company away from the office.
Connect with coworkers in audio or video calls, private messages, or share insights in specific channels. The built-in tools are centered around communication, but if you need more collaboration, Slack allows you to integrate more than 2,500 other apps to complete your remote work management stack.
Slack is well known among most of the corporate world, so it’s no surprise that it’s used by companies such as Uber, Target, Netflix, Expedia, and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.
Slack offers four pricing plans:
- Free: Slack’s free plan is generous in that it doesn’t limit your number of users, so it’s suitable for any size business. You are limited to the types of messages and video chats you can do (one-on-one only). You’re also limited to 10 integrations.
- Pro: The low-priced plan from Slack costs $7.50 per person, per month (billed annually). It’s at this level that you get unlimited access to message history and integrations.
- Business+: Slack offers a plan to which you can scale if the limitations on the Free and Pro plans are too restricting. It costs $12.50 per user, per month (billed annually) and includes single sign-on, channel posting permissions for all channels, and 24/7 support.
- Enterprise Grid: The Enterprise plan is only for those companies that need priority support and HIPAA compliance. Plus, you can create unlimited workspaces (all other plans only allow one), so it’s a good choice for multiple brands. There is no public pricing, so you’ll need to contact Slack for a custom quote.
Best For
Slack is a great collaboration tool for any size business, and it offers enough plans for scaling up as you need more support, storage, or features.
Asana makes it easy for remote teams to stay connected with projects, conversation, and collaboration. Wherever you are, as long as you have an internet connection, you can access projects, assign work, and communicate with your teams.
PROS
- Feature-packed free plan with few limitations
- Excellent tools for cross-team collaboration on projects, tasks, and goals
- No limits on file storage (except file sizes)
- Conversations, assets remain centralized to project and tasks
- Drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to build projects
- Workflow automation helps reduce manual tasks (available on paid plans)
- Real-time reporting makes it easy for managers to see 50,000-foot views of data with the ability to drill down to more granular views
CONS
- No built-in time tracking (must use time tracking app integration)
- Overwhelming amount of features for those not used to project management software
- Tasks and subtasks cannot be assigned to more than one user
Asana, like most project management software these days, is cloud-based, so you can work from any device, as long as you have an internet connection, which is helpful for remote teams. When you’re managing a team remotely, it can be difficult to find a time slot that works for everyone, but Asana includes status updates, which let you broadcast to the whole team about a project so everyone knows how the work is progressing.
Asana’s built-in communication tools, such as commenting and messaging, also make it easy for everyone to stay in touch without having to wait on email (or remember who to CC).
Amazon, Google, The New Yorker, AT&T, PayPal, Slack, Spotify all use Asana.
Asana has four plans:
- Basic: This is a forever-free plan. There are no limits to tasks, projects, messages, or file storage (100MB per file limit). Collaboration is limited to 15 members, so it’s a good choice for new small businesses and solopreneurs.
- Premium: For $10.99 per user, per month (billed annually) you can get everything in the free plan plus timeline view, a workflow builder, forms, automated rules, and milestones. You can also invite an unlimited number of guests (good for client approval on projects).
- Business: This plan costs $24.99 per user, per month (billed annually) and includes everything from the two lower-tier plans. There are more advanced features at this level, such as goals, custom rules builder, and integrations with programs like Salesforce and Tableau, making it a great pick for larger businesses and agencies.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan requires a custom quote from Asana. You get all the same features as the Business plan, but you also unlock custom branding, data export, and 24/7 support. It’s best for large companies that want to add their brand to the Asana platform for a more professional look and require access to customer support at all hours of the day and night.
Best For
In Jan. 2023, Asana made some “quality of life” changes to a few of its features. You can expect the company to update the platform once per month.
- Attachments now show upload dates when you hover over them, which saves you time. There’s no need to click into a task to see when attachments were added.
- Portfolios got a couple of upgrades. Now you can add people and date custom fields to portfolios and you can add comment-only projects (portfolios only available on Business and Enterprise plans).
- The workload feature now lets you use estimated hours to help regulate resources across your team and projects (workload feature only available on Business and Enterprise plans).
Papaya combines global workforce and payroll management into a single global platform that's capable of connecting you to a wide network of verified local vendors.
PROS
CONS
Remote work means employees all over the world. It probably also means contractors who work for you part time. Whether you are paying construction workers in South Africa or part time software engineers in Australia, PapayaGlobal is a payroll provider who can handle your needs. They'll also serve as the employer of record for your employees so that you can take advantage of group buying power on benefits.
Toyota, GDIT, Microsoft, Wix, Teradata, Ncino
Papaya has 3 plans:
- Payroll: In this plan, Papaya runs and manages your entire payroll process for one, all-inclusive fee ranging from $20 - $100 per employee per month.
- Global EOR: In this plan, Papaya’s in-country partners will serve as employers of record and assume responsibility for payroll, workforce management, benefits, compliance, and more. The pricing of this plan ranges from $770- $1000 per employee per month.
- Contractor Management & IC Compliance: With this plan, you can outsource particular services to a domestic or foreign contractor. The pricing of this plan starts from $25 per employee per month.
Best For
Medium to large-sized companies looking for a method to pay employees and independent contractors in different countries.
Trainual goes beyond the typical LMS functionality; it offers tools for employee onboarding, process documentation, company Wiki, and standard operating procedure (SOP) creation.
PROS
CONS
Trainual helps companies keep track of all the how-to's in their company which means faster onboarding of new employees and less time searching for the best way to do XYZ once they are on the job. This is a great way to document your company's playbooks for everything from customer facings roles to engineering. And, this sort of knowledge documentation becomes all that more important for remote companies.
IronMan, UPS, Stanford University, Design Pickle, Harmon Brothers.
Trainual has two plans with fixed pricing:
- Pro: This plan allows up to 25 users to create unlimited documentation and gives them access to templates for training, tests, etc. This plan costs $99 a month when billed annually
- Premium: Users on this plan (up to 25) get everything from the Pro plan plus phone support/coaching, stock image library access, and more. This plan costs $149 a month when billed annually
A custom plan can also be created for larger companies upon request.
Best For
Medium to large-sized companies looking to streamline the way they train their new hires.
Not only is Peakon a great employee engagement solution, it has a ton of analytical functionality that makes it great for people planning too.
PROS
- Workday Peakon keeps feedback anonymous, which allows employees to give their opinion without fear of reprisal.
- Surveys are easy to navigate, and employees can answer as many questions as they like from the survey—and skip over any that they don’t want to answer.
- Based on responses, Workday Peakon offers suggestions on what you can do to improve employee experience.
CONS
- Peakon doesn't come with the ability to create custom reports. It does, however, offer a variety of pre-built reports that you can use.
- A few users shared that it can be hard to navigate Peakon and find employee profiles at times.
- The platform’s pricing isn’t transparent and there aren’t free trials at this time.
In a remote environment, employee engagement software is an essential tool to measure your culture, and ensure your employee population stays connected to their work. Workday Peakon’s Employee Voice solution allows companies to get feedback and act to built a better work environment. This is especially powerful for fast changing companies who need to stay on top of how their employees are feeling with new work norms.
EasyJet, Verizon, Nando's, Pret, Capgemini
Peakon has a three-tiered pricing structure:
- Essential: This plan offers baseline engagement features, a mobile app, and 24-hour online support.
- Business: This plan provides everything from the Essential plan, but adds personalized benchmarking, custom insights, action plans, and HRIS integrations. You'd also have a dedicated Customer Success consultant.
- Premier: With this plan, you'll receive everything previously mentioned, plus micro-learning sessions, attrition prediction, hierarchy mapping, business impact metrics, and unlimited custom dashboards. You all have extended Customer Success support and change management training.
The pricing of the above plans isn’t disclosed on Peakon’s website. Contact their sales team for a price quote according to the size and scope of your operation.
Best For
Large and enterprise-sized organizations who can put all of Peakon's features to good use.
Featuring a modern and intuitive interface, Lessonly is versatile training and coaching software that’s loved by nearly 4 million teammates.
PROS
CONS
From small companies to the Fortune 500, employee learning and development is incredibly important. Remote work means new challenges for onboarding and upskilling workforces. Lessonly's simple to use learning management system allows you to quickly build and deploy training materials. They also have a host of content around remote work specifically.
HelloFresh, Trunk Club, McAfee, Salesloft, Jostens, Lending Home
Lessonly has two plans:
- Pro: This plan includes Lessonly’s training software, intuitive lesson builder, interactive quizzes & surveys, automation & triggers, training event tracking, and integrations. Pro plan customers also get assigned a personal Customer Experience Manager
- Pro+Coaching: This plan includes everything from Lessonly’s Pro package, plus Lessonly Practice, Coaching, Conversations, and Certifications.
The pricing of the above plans isn’t disclosed on Lessonly’s website. Contact their sales team for a price quote accordingly to the size and scope of your operation.
Best For
Companies of all sizes wanting to streamline the way to provide training to their employees.
Use-Cases: Why Use Remote Team Management Software
For the uninitiated, remote work means employees are working from outside of the office, typically from their homes. This term is almost exclusively applied to white collar knowledge workers who are doing most of their work via computers or communication that can be accomplished across disparate locations.
From an HR perspective, remote work allows for many benefits including access new talent pools as now you are not limited to your current geography — but it comes with its own set of challenges (more on that below). Simply put, there is something to be said for the collaboration and teamwork among employees that work in the same office, which is difficult to replicate with a remote team. Fortunately, remote team management software helps make it easier to replicate so your employees still feel like they are a valuable part of your organization.
With that, here are common use-cases for top remote work tools:
- Video Conferencing: Companies like Zoom help bring remote employees “face to face,” which in turn can improve communication and lead to more effective collaboration. Use video conferencing for one-on-one meetings or large group meetings.
- Team Communication/Messaging: Email isn’t the only way for employees and team members to communicate. Platforms like Slack provide instant messaging services on a one-to-one basis or in group chats.
- Employee Engagement: Get feedback from remote employees using tools like Peakon, which let you plan, track and measure the impact of your initiatives on your people and business as a whole.
- Company Culture: To bolster a sense of community and company culture, platforms like Slack and Zoom allow teams to interact more socially. For example, teams can create Slack channels dedicated to more personal topics like parenting or specific hobbies. And Zoom can be used for coffee breaks, lunch hours, or happy hours.
- International Payroll and Benefits: Whether you have distributed teams or an entirely remote workforce, how you offer benefits and perks requires different resources than a company with a single office. Fortunately, platforms like Mistro exist to help you provide benefits packages across 200 countries while solutions like Papaya Global help you automate payroll, reduce global payroll costs and ensure compliance with local laws.
- Time and Attendance Tracking: Don’t worry about remote workers not getting their work done. You can use remote work tools to easily track their time, gauge app and website usage, and more.
- Remote Worker Job Boards: Looking to hire remote workers? Post your openings on job boards specific to that talent-type.
- Screening Remote Workers: Conduct an interview and screening process for remote workers that lets you really get to know them virtually and understand how they work, how they structure their day, etc.
- Productivity & Project Management: Take your to-do lists up a notch with project management tools that track deadlines, collaborators, progress updates, and more. These tools help ensure everyone is on the same page regarding who is doing what, when.
- Onboarding and Training: Automate onboarding processes with web-based policies, playbooks, and trainings — and hold them accountable with tests and mini quizzes. Use fun, engaging content, rich media, and more, you’ll get new employees up to speed in no time.
Considerations & Common Mistakes
As great as remote work can be, there are some common challenges that can arise if you’re not properly set up to manage it. Here, we outline a few considerations, mistakes, and recommendations so your remote work efforts are a seamless extension of your workforce.
- Miscommunication: When you don’t see or talk to someone face-to-face, things can more easily get lost in translation. To ensure that everyone is on the same page, you’ll want to strike a balance between synchronous communication (i.e. real-time communication through video calls, group chats, etc.) and asynchronous (i.e. recorded video messages, task-tracking software, emails, and collaborative docs). Create a balance/plan that works for your team, and make sure everyone is on board with it.
- Coordination: When work is coordinated, teams are more productive. But when workers are not actually together, it can be difficult to get and stay coordinated. So try to build “tempo” management and predictability into the workday. That way, everyone will know when a certain project begins, when milestones need to be met, etc. Not only that, remote workers can better focus on a given task and NOT get overwhelmed by other distractions, like what’s happening at their home.
- Time Zone Mis-Management: If your company is global and you have employees working in different time zones, you might experience “work silos” where information and knowledge isn’t properly shared/communicated across offices. To prevent this, create a working “time zone” for your team, where there is some overlap between employees in different geographical areas. That way, an employee ending their work day can properly update another who is just starting theirs. This will help keep communication continuous — and morale high.
- Burnout: According to Chanell, “most workers, remote or onsite, experience some form of burnout. However, work exhaustion becomes even more of an issue for remote workers. The workstation is no longer at the office; it is at the coffee table in the living room or the desk in the spare room. It is hard to turn work off when it is so easy to jump back in. Remote managers have to help employees understand why it is vital to pace themselves and set times to recharge.”
Benefits of Remote Work
There are a lot of benefits to having a remote workforce — and typically, you hear about the benefits from the perspective of a remote worker. To really get a sense of the benefits a company reaps from having a remote workforce, we caught up with Chanell Alexander, editor of RemoteHabits. Here’s what she had to say about key remote work benefits:
- Having access to a larger talent pool - These individuals want to hire the best, and remote work allows them to find professionals who are the right fit, regardless of where they are.
- It makes the barrier of entry to business much lower - The traditional components of starting a business that includes renting a building or hiring onsite staff can be costly. Developing a 100 percent remote company bypasses these requirements.
- Increases flexibility - Entrepreneurs can live in any part of the country they want, while still running their business. This situation allows them to live closer to family, or live in places where the cost of living may be lower.
- Lowers costs - No building, commute, or office supplies means lower expenses. Not to mention, you can hire people who live in less-expensive areas.
Demo Questions: What To Ask During Demos
Before investing in any remote work management solution, you should schedule a demo with your platform(s) of choice. They’ll give you the opportunity to see how everything works and ask questions to make sure it’s the right fit for your organization.
Here are some questions we recommend asking:
- What are the best practices for remote worker adoption on this platform?
- How have you seen remote workers mis-use this product?
- How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack and therefore what integrations do I need?
- How will others in the organization use this solution?
- What are the key features I want to ask about?
- What are the things that would make me nervous about buying this sort of solution?
Implementation
How you implement a remote work strategy is so important for the success of your employees — and your company as a whole. Here are a few ways to make remote work a high-functioning component of your business that keeps employees engaged and happy, fosters company culture, and brings in the most productivity for the business. You can also learn from an interview done with a PeopleOps pro who's run a remote team for years now.
- Mimic your office culture: Whether you’re going fully remote or just hiring remote workers, you want to make sure the online culture matches the in-person/office culture. So think about what your culture is and what makes it work. What makes it fun for your employees? From there, you can think about ways to bring that fun and unique energy to the remote space. Whether it’s through digital coffee breaks, “water cooler” chats, happy hours, etc. And, as budget allows, plan for at least one in-person retreat each year for each team or the whole company so remote employees can interact with their colleagues in person.
- Create “socializing” channels: Using Slack or another messaging platform, create unique channels specific to different hobbies or life stages. That way, employees can interact on a personal level and get to know each other “outside” of work.
- Commit to transparency: To help teams stay on the same page and consistently feel like their work matters, make a commitment to transparency and open communication. The last thing you want to deal with is an employee who feels in the dark on a project or sidelined just because they aren’t in the office every day.
- Have regular weekly or daily “stand-ups”: To keep everyone on the same page and help achieve the transparency and communication that is key to remote work success, have each team hold a standing video call once a week or every day where each team member shares what they’re working on, where they might need help, what they’ve learned from the previous week/day that might help their colleagues, etc.
- Use a shared language: This is really geared towards global companies with employees who don’t have the same native language. Since remote work is done online and things like shared knowledge-bases should be centralized to maintain consistency and understanding across the entire company, you should opt for everything to be written in one shared language that everyone understands.
- Be nimble: Remote work is on the rise, but it has not been the norm in business — i.e. everyone works differently in a remote environment or with remote employees. As such, you should expect some “testing and learning” as you get a remote strategy off the ground and be prepared to make changes as needed.
Remote Team Management Software FAQs
What is remote work?
Remote work is an arrangement where employees for a company may telecommute and complete their work from anywhere without having to physically be in an office building or on location.
What are remote work management tools?
Remote work management tools are software solutions designed to allow companies to engage employees, collaborate, and grow their business without having a physical office presence.
What are some examples of remote work management tools?
Remote work management tools include employee engagement software, video conferencing software, learning management systems, communication tools, payroll/benefits software, and more.
What are the benefits of remote work?
With remote work, companies have access to larger talent pools, the barrier of entry to business is lower, employees have increased flexibility, and companies can operate at a lower cost.
What are some common mistakes that come up when managing remote employees?
Be wary of common mistakes when managing remote employees, including miscommunication, poor coordination, time zone mis-management, and burnout.
Next Steps
As we said earlier, remote work is on the rise. Currently, 43% of U.S. employees work remotely to some degree. And it’s becoming a key value proposition for employees and candidates. In fact, some employees will only take a job if it is remote. The global coronavirus pandemic is likely testing your company’s ability to operate remotely, so you’re already learning a lot about what’s working and what isn’t. Listen to the feedback you’re getting and use it to create a more formal strategy to foster and better manage remote workers.
And remember, at the end of the day, remote work success really comes down to two core functions: communicating and sharing. How you do these effectively depends on the tools you choose to invest in. So think about the struggles you’ve been facing now, identify a few tools that could help, and schedule your demos.
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