How do you manage to have a long-distance relationship with your employees? And how can you have employees feel connected and work productively, even when they’re so far away? Business success lies in the tool-choice of their Managing Remote Workers Toolkit. 

Great remote team communication & collaboration technology and tools, as well as strategically-set processes for each project and goal. The good news is that collaboration and communication tools have expanded and modified their functionality to meet the needs of remote teams. Which tool should you use for your remote team communication? Here’s a guide to narrow down different tools which will fit best for your team type:

Managing Remote Workers Toolkit 101

1. For Team Collaboration– Slack

Slack is one of the most widely used tools from the managing remote workers toolkit. Remote team management companies like Zapier, Buffer, and Help Scout consider Slack their “virtual offices”—a place where employees can connect with their colleagues or management, both one-on-one or in groups.

 With Slack, you can:

• Share files
• Speak as a group or through direct messaging
• Enjoy almost 100 integrations, or use the open API to build your own
• Access securely encrypted transfer data
• Use desktop and mobile messaging
• Use two-way video and audio
• Enjoy a comprehensive search functionality
• Personalize user profiles

One feature that stands out is the ability to install apps that automatically report on business activity, like new email subscribers or product reviews, and bots that help keep employees engaged.

2. For Private Remote Team Communication– Zangi 

In a world of data breaches and privacy loss, Zangi is one of the few systems that companies trust for communication and is a great addition to our Managing Remote Workers Toolkit: for calls, messages, and collaboration. This is because Zangi gives them complete ownership of their own application and desktop, hosted on their company servers. 

 With Zangi, you can:

• Send end to end encrypted messages one-on-one or in groups
• Web Dashboard for full management of your business and team
• Add, remove users to your Network 
• Send notifications, view statistics, activity & more. 
• Integrate your existing CRM to Zangi via API codes
• Integrate your existing office phone system for secure roaming-free calls
• Use desktop and mobile messaging
• Add special security algorithms and keys into the source code
• Add your logo, branding, features to your app
• Apps can be incognito or we published on Google Play or the App Store.

What stands out is the app (app’s communication, data, and control) belongs to you and only you. If your solution provider IPs are closed or get blocked, that will not impact you. 

3. For Video Conferencing– Zoom

Everyone’s had the memory of frustrating technical glitches, frozen video, and no sound. Thankfully, Zoom is a world away from all that, which explains the company’s rapid growth from 30,000 users in 2014 to 700,000 users in 2018.

With Zoom, you get:

• Cloud Video Conferencing
• HD Voice with dynamic voice detection
• Group Collaboration and Messaging 
• Screen sharing documents, photos, and video clips
• Whiteboarding and Mobile Whiteboarding
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption
• Unlimited VOIP and Call me/Call Out
• Content Sharing and scheduling & starting meetings

What stands out is gallery view, which allows you to view everyone on the chat at once which makes it feel, for a moment, like your remote team is close together. 

4.For Design Collaboration– InVision

InVision is undoubtedly the most comprehensive tool of design software on the market. This solution provides users with prototyping tools and features that enable them to create better, functional prototypes that they can present their clients. The prototype is clickable, it makes it easy for designers and clients for managing remote workers toolkit/ communication and to be on the same page with each other. Remote teams like Treehouse, Help Scout, and Trello loves using it.

With inVision, you get:

• Design Prototyping
• Sharing and Presentation
• Feedback and Commenting
• Real-Time Design Meetings and Whiteboarding
• Design Organization and Collaboration
• Project Management for Designers
• User Testing and Research

What stands out is InVision Freehand is like a whiteboard that allows you to wireframe, plan, design presentations, and give and receive feedback, between designers but also in conjunction with other stakeholders.

5. For Project Management– Trello

Trello stands out from our other Managing Remote Workers Toolkit tools for its style, simplicity, and performance. By visualizing what needs to get done and aggregating feedback from the whole team, Trello helps remote teams increase productivity. It can be used for editorial calendars, project management, to catalog stories from our customers, and more.

With Trello you get:

• Quick overview on front and back of cards
• An easy organization with tags, labels, and categories
• Checklists, with a progress meter
• Easy uploading of files and attachments
• Data filtering
• Archiving of card records
• Deadline reminders
• Email notifications
• Activity log and assign tasks
• SSL encryption of data
• Search function
• Remote team management

What stands out is you get a whiteboard (to use anywhere you like), filled with lists of sticky notes, photos, files, with each note as a task for you and your team. 

6. For Time Management– Teamwork

Track every hour to boost your remote team’s productivity. The tool lets you invoice all tracked time and expenses. You can create custom time reports of time logged on the project. And export your report and time log entries as Excel, CSV, or PDF.

With Teamwork you can:

• Organize and categorize their active projects 
• Get a snapshot of what the team is working on
• Create project roles, invite followers, assign project owners, add status updates.
• Attach documents to tasks, set their priority, add estimates, progress, reminders, tags, comments.
• Assign milestone features such as description, reminder, calendar, tags.
• Calendar tool for tasks, milestones, and events.
• Enables users to write messages within projects.
• Log time spent on tasks and projects, and even set start and end times. 

What stands out is the capability to add subtasks from task list templates, include or exclude subtasks from board views, more bulk editing options, search for task followers, and others.

7. For File Management– Google Drive

From our Managing Remote Workers Toolkit, this tool for file management often is more important because geographically dispersed employees access files during times when their colleagues can’t be reached.

With Google Drive you get:

• Standard 15GB of storage space
• To store all their email communications, attachments, photos and videos directly on to the Google Drive storage servers 
• Microsoft Office files can also be stored in Google Drive safely. 
• Data stored in the cloud is stored under high-quality security with Secured Socket Layered online protection.
• To store all their personal photos on the Drive

What stands out is that all types of files and data can be stored in Google Drive, which is one of the important benefits as users need not worry about the type of files they possess.

8. For Signing Papers: Adobe

Adobe Document Sign makes it easy for remote managers to get signatures easily and swiftly. The good thing is that you do not need an Adobe account to be able to sign documents. Moreover, it is compatible with all browsers and mobile device operating systems. 

What stands out is that this tool solves the document signing issue without having to go through the process of downloading, printing, signing then scanning. Infographic below and free to download: