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More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we can all agree that shifting to remote work has been a treacherous and challenging journey. Businesses, both big and small, were forced to embrace the work-from-home model to ensure business continuity. It turns out, the world should've embraced remote working a long time ago. A recent Owl Labs survey shows that almost 80 percent of remote workers say they are happier and more productive when working remotely. However, the shift hasn’t been easy, and without the right remote work tools, collaborating and communicating with teams can be a real struggle. Miscommunication can lead to half-baked products and delays—things that kill your business. As a manager or employer, you want to make sure that you have the best tools to manage your remote teams. They will help you keep in touch with your teams, track work progress, stay organized, and collaborate on tasks and projects. We’ve narrowed down the top 27 must-have work-from-home tools for happy and productive teams. Why You Need Remote Work Tools. Working from home may have its benefits, but it also comes with a set of unique challenges. Without a proper employee management system, performance can suffer. That’s where telecommuting software comes in. Remote work tools help managers, team leaders, and supervisors collaborate, communicate, set work schedule, assign work, transact, and promote company culture. They help reduce stress for both employers and employees, but most importantly, ensure smooth workflow and balanced work distribution. Let’s dive into the tools you need to manage your remote workers while helping them grow professionally. Best Remote Work Tools for Time Tracking and Employee Monitoring. Working with distributed teams poses an accountability and transparency hurdle. As an employer, wouldn’t you want to know how employees spend their day? After all, you want to be sure you're paying for work done, not for time wasted. 1. Traqq. Traqq is a time tracking app that offers both employers and employees the most efficient way to manage time. As you are aware, working from home offers a flexible approach to accomplishing tasks. To be productive, you need to stay on track of your projects and know how many hours you spend working. Traqq’s clock app makes recording your total work hours easy. All you have to do is click on Start whenever you're ready to start working and Stop when taking a break. The best thing about Traqq is that you don’t need the Internet to keep tracking. It works offline and syncs your data as soon as you get back online. Traqq is also one of the most effective employee monitoring tools. With its screen tracking feature, it ensures you get accurate information about your team’s daily performance. Just because employees are thousands of miles away doesn't mean you can’t monitor what they are doing. The software takes random screenshots and video recordings, giving you valuable insight into your employees’ activities. Screen monitoring is automated, and any red periods in a worker’s report indicate idle time. Of course, you can review the dashboard to see what they have been up to throughout the day. Moreover, Traqq records the apps and websites that workers use during work hours. This helps to improve your team’s transparency as well as ensure employees comply with the company policy. With Traqq’s Activity tracker, you get a visual presentation of tasks and how much time was spent on them. Additionally, you can get an overview of your or your employees’ activities at the end of the week or month, which can help you measure profitability. Traqq employee monitoring software gathers useful information that shines a light on your team’s overall performance and productivity. Best Work-from-Home Software for Employee Onboarding. When hiring new employees, you need to set them up for success from day one. You must help them understand the company culture and how it works. You should also assist them in establishing a foundation of strong relationships across the organization. A smart manager knows that effective onboarding improves employee retention. The right remote employee onboarding tools can help you orient new employees in a stress-free way. Here are our top choices: 2. BambooHR. BambooHR is a self-onboarding tool that simplifies the employee onboarding process. The software, which is ideal for small and medium businesses, gathers all employee data in one secure database. The app collects and organizes all the information you create during the employee life cycle. It then uses that information to make your next onboarding quick and simple. New workers can find all the basic tools and details to get acquainted with their workplace on the platform. 3. Paylocity. Paylocity combines more than a dozen resources to help you tackle your unique HR and payroll challenges. It comes with features like workforce management, expense management, employee recruitment, new hire onboarding, and Learning Management System (LMS). This cloud-based HR solution ideally streamlines not only employee onboarding, but also other essential administrative tasks. It's easily scalable, making it a good option for small, medium, and big businesses. Paylocity lets you add new workers to the system automatically and track processes like payroll, attendance, and budget management. You can also monitor employee progress and completion rates. Other things you can do include sending reminders and announcements. 4. Jotform Sign Jotform Sign is an automation tool that allows you to collect electronic signatures from custom-created documents. Use their drag-and-drop builder to create secure documents with an e-signature field and share it with a link to automate your employee onboarding process. Get notified when someone signs your documents and use approval flows to hand them off to another department to advance the cycle. Upload your signed documents to your cloud storage account with online integrations to store them. Best Remote Working Tools for Hosting and Virtual Meetings. With in-person interaction now slowly phasing out, you need to find ways to know what’s going with your teams and customers. These tools help you keep in touch with teammates and interact with clients on a personal level. 5. Howspace. If you engage in digital facilitation a lot, Howspace comes with all the necessary tools for staying productive. The AI-powered software allows you to create and facilitate workshops with a limitless amount of participants. The tool offers a single platform for hosting all discussions and exercises, saving time that could’ve been wasted on note-taking. Facilitators can engage participants before, during, and after an event, helping them get familiarized with the event’s goals and missions. Howspace has many applications, including HR management, professional learning sessions, organizational development, and transformation process, with a focus on learning and involvement. 6. GoToMeeting. A team can only work efficiently if they can collaborate properly. GoToMeeting enables teams to hold virtual meetings regardless of their location. It comes with helpful features like screen sharing, in-session chat, drawing tools, and keyboard and mouse sharing. The tool is designed to adapt to different LTE and network conditions to ensure consistency in video and audio qualities. Users are guaranteed protected communication using state-of-the-art security. After you’ve scheduled a meeting, you can set GoToMeeting to call your phone when it's time to start the meeting. The software is customizable, and users can change their webcam backgrounds to a theme of their liking. It also lets you share automatic transcripts of your recorded meetings, making sure that all members have all the details. GoToMeeting can integrate with many apps, including Outlook, Slack, Salesforce, Zoho, and Hubspot. 7. Nextiva. Nextiva is a virtual phone system that simplifies business communications. It combines video conferencing, voice, messaging, and customer management services, making collaboration with your customers or teams easy, wherever they are. The tool offers managers internal and external communication solutions and helps them monitor customer relationships and interactions. Nextiva integrates with existing contact and customer relationship management tools for improved workflow. The service automates mundane service tasks so that teams can focus on what matters the most – customers. 8. Zoom. Zoom is one of the most popular work-from-home communication tools that bring together remote teams for better collaboration. It lets you schedule, launch, and record virtual meetings via your phone, computer, or phone dial-in. Zoom also allows screen sharing for engaged discussions and participation. The platform is easy to use and gives individuals access to other solutions like Zoom Rooms, Zoom Events, and Zoom Phone. Its free plan allows you to host up to 100 participants and hold unlimited group meetings for up to 40 minutes. 9. RingCentral. RingCentral offers unlimited video meetings and team messaging all day long, at no cost. It lets you quickly switch meetings from your laptop to your phone, so you can continue with the meeting while preparing dinner for your family. With RingCentral, you have more control over who can get into meetings, screen share, invite others, and send in-meeting chats. The app also allows you to chat with internal and external teams, share files and create dedicated threads for any of your ongoing projects. Best Remote Working Software for Productivity Monitoring. Remote workers must deliver quality work every time. The best way to assess their performance and detect when efficiency is declining is to use productivity monitoring tools. 10. Hubstaff. Hubstaff makes keeping tabs on employee productivity simple and effective. You can check how people are spending their work hours, completed tasks, and when they were...

The 29 Best Remote Work Tools to Stay Productive in 2022