The Best Remote Working Software in 2020
Remote work and the possibility of working from wherever you may be in the world had already become a lot more common in the last few years, even before the current situation that we find ourselves in today — that is Covid-19.
Throughout the years many studies have been done that show the advantages of a more flexible working culture and how it can increase productivity, with many of the big tech companies providing a more relaxed approach around working from home. The concept of a 4-day work week has even been tested out through some organizations.
Nonetheless, for most businesses remote work and working from home have not been a reality until now. This can, of course, be quite overwhelming, especially if you do not have the right tools in place.
Luckily, there is a wide selection of tools available for remote work so you and your team can maximize productivity and work just as well, if not even better, from home. Let’s take a look at our list for the best remote working software in 2020 (in no particular order).
If you’re looking for some shortcuts, jump straight to:
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Productivity
- Analytics and Tracking
- People Management and Engagement
- Customer Success and Support
Communication
Slack is amazing for teams. We use slack and its many integrations to communicate internally, communicate with external vendors, and receive alerts about our product. It is a single place where people can effectively work together, find important information, and access hundreds of thousands of critical applications and services to do their best work.
Stay in touch with your colleagues and organizations through this video conferencing tool. In order to make work from home more personal and keep clear communication, you can use Zoom to have team meetings, check-ins or calls to partners and prospective clients. It can be used for video, phone, content sharing, and chat runs across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems.
Loom is a great tool to make instantly shareable videos. It’s an easy way to train new team members on how to use different parts of the product, as well as for diagnosing any issues within the product etc.
Troop Messenger is a compact remote work tool for small, medium, and large enterprises. Team members can interact via instant messaging, audio and video calling, location and file sharing, and by creating unlimited groups on the go. Troop Messenger can be integrated with essential apps like Dropbox and Google Drive for example.
Xtensio is a great tool for teams to easily create, share and manage all of their business documents together. You can create pitches, sales sheets, reports, case studies, agendas and more. You can also add images, videos, tables, buttons and other interactive modules.
Nextiva Business Phone Service
For company remote working, an effective and reliable system of communication with clients and within the team is necessary, so a lot of companies turn to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. Nextiva VoIP is a great business communications platform that provides businesses of all sizes (small or small) with top VoIP phone service, nifty CRM capabilities, and excellent customer service.
Whereby lets you start video meetings directly in the browser, without requiring guests for download anything or register. You can make easy-to-read permanent room links (whereby.com/roomname) that can be customized with your branding. Also works in the browser on mobile and tablets.
Rocket.Chat is a communication platform for teams coming together to chat and collaborate. It increases business efficiency by bringing messages, video calls, file sharing, and all team communication into one place. Rocket.Chat can also integrate with social networks, mobile apps, websites and also allow companies to talk to other organizations by using federation protocols to interconnect the servers.
Collaboration
Perhaps you know this tool from storing your family photos in the cloud but Dropbox has come a long way since first starting out as *just* a cloud storage company. They are now building the world’s first smart workspace — bringing all of your team’s content together while letting you use the tools you love, so you can focus on the work that matters.
Toggl Plan takes a different approach to project management and team collaboration. Instead of interruption driven collaboration, it focuses on giving everyone in the team a great overview of what needs to be done. This is what makes it great for remote, distributed teams working across timezones. Toggl Plan comes with timelines and boards that help you plan projects, track task progress, and manage team workloads.
Mindomo is a collaborative tool that helps teams organize their activities by assigning tasks, setting due dates, and also doing brainstorming sessions where they can generate ideas and discuss them in real-time. Team members can create mind maps, concept maps, outlines, and Gantt charts and share them with their colleagues or with outside collaborators to better explain concepts and the tasks they are planning to do.
Status Hero is a lightweight application for tracking daily goals, activity logs from your tools, and status updates from your team, all in one place. Sync up your team, kill stand-up meetings, inform stakeholders, and quickly cut through all of the management noise.
Taskworld is an all-in-one collaboration space. It seamlessly blends Kanban boards, team messaging and interactive reports into one clean app. Taskworld’s highly addictive Kanban experience is perfect for both agile project management and remote teams. It’s real-time team messaging is the perfect way to reduce email clutter.
GitHub is the developer company. The GitHub platform is where developers can create, share, and ship the best code possible. It is the home of open source collaboration. It is where new developers get started and where experienced developers expand their knowledge. A community where developers come together to solve the unsolvable and test the limits of what software can do.
Productivity
Trello is a visual collaboration tool that brings a shared perspective to any team’s projects. Teams of all sizes can use this tool to plan, organize, and accomplish goals from any device, anywhere. It also allows people to celebrate their achievements with fun and flexible features that are intuitively simple and encourage a personal touch.
Accurate time tracking software to help remote teams become more productive.
10to8 is appointment scheduling software for remote teams that want to arrange virtual staff meetings and client appointments efficiently, in order to avoid ad-hoc meetings and interruptions that negatively affect productivity.
What makes 10to8 different from other online scheduling tools is the robust communication and coordination system. You can send out intelligent SMS and email reminders to staff and clients, and even track whether the messages have been opened. These reminders are proven to reduce the number of missed appointments by up to 90%.
They help teams organize and manage all of their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. Some of their features include task management, reporting, a customer portal, automatic notifications collaboration tools, dashboards and more.
With Wrike, your team can collaborate in real-time and you are able to tailor the platform to your needs with custom workflows, fields, and reports. It is also very suitable for creative teams since it provides an Adobe CreativeCloud extension that covers admission and approval so teams can easily focus on their creative ideas.
Mailbird is an intuitive tool that unifies all your email accounts from many different providers into one place and integrates with the most popular Task, Calendar, Messaging and Video Calling Apps. It’s smart, easy and provides businesses and professionals with one tool to check and manage emails, improve productivity, collaboration, and communication.
Analytics and Tracking
Rebrandly is the leader in link branding and it provides the easiest way to create, measure, and manage short URL’s with a custom domain name. This tool provides a detailed analytics feature that allows you to learn about who’s clicking on your links — like what country the clicks are coming from, the most popular times and days and what social media platform the clicks originated from.
Google Analytics is an essential marketing analytics tool for any business and a must-have tool for anyone working in marketing. Use it to track visits, goals, subscribers, and pretty much anything else that’s happening on your website.
ClickMeter is also a tool that falls into the link management category. With Clickmeter you can monitor, compare and optimize all your marketing links in one place to increase the conversion rate. It provides advanced conversion-tracking capabilities and deeper link analytics insights.
Supermetrics allows marketers to move all their data into one place for analytics & reporting. Whether it’s spreadsheets like Google Sheets & Excel, dashboard & visualization platforms like Google Data Studio, or a data warehouse like BigQuery, Supermetrics lets you move your marketing data from 50+ sources to where you want it.
By combining both analysis and feedback tools, Hotjar gives the ‘big picture’ of how to improve a site’s user experience and performance/conversion rates. Use this heatmap tool to quickly and easily identify what’s working on your website or blog and where there’s room for improvement.
People Management and Engagement
15Five is a leading provider of people management software. Through strategic weekly check-ins, 15Five delivers everything a manager needs to maintain visibility and impact employee performance, including continuous feedback, objectives (OKR) tracking, recognition, 1-on-1s, and 360° reviews.
Glint is a people success platform that leverages real-time people data to help global organizations increase employee engagement, develop their people, and improve results.
Customer Success and Support
Helpjuice is a knowledge base software solution that can be used to help your customers as well as your service and support teams. With Helpjuice, you can easily create a central hub of information that’s accessible to your customers (and employees) at any time. This allows you to automate on-demand customer support by letting customers find answers to any frequently asked questions as well as to troubleshoot any problems they may have with your product or service. In turn, because your customers will be better able to help themselves, your support and service teams will be able to better assist customers that need hands-on guidance
Cloudtalk.io is a virtual phone system for sales and customer service teams at any location. Maintain a local presence with an international phone number and run your virtual call center anywhere in the world.
Dixa is a customer service and engagement software. Their multichannel customer service platform empowers brands to deliver a better customer experience by giving agents the tools they need to provide fast, efficient, and effective customer service every time.
Dixa unifies phone, email, chat, and messaging apps ensuring no customer slips through the cracks while providing agents with more context and relevant data at their fingertips for better working experience. Integrations and powerful automations minimize repetitive work and maximize productivity, making it easier for support teams to provide quick and personalized customer support every time from one single system.
Zendesk is a service-first CRM company that builds support, sales, and customer engagement software designed to foster better customer relationships. Solve tickets easily and support your customers on any channel: text SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, social media.
Wrapping up
So there you have it, a list of the best remote working software in order to stay productive and in sync with your team.
Many of these tools can be used in conjunction with one another, so it’s important to do your research and outline exactly what you need and want and take it from there.
Do you use any other tools for remote work? Let us know in the comments below if we missed one of your favorites, we’d love to hear from you!
Further reading:
- The Best Live Chat Software in 2020
- 150+ Best Marketing Tools: Ultimate List
- Best Task Management Software 2020
This article is about:
- Best remote working software
- Working from home
- Tools for remote work
- The best remote working software in 2020
