Top 5 productivity tools for remote workers

Evidently, the work-from-home setup has both pros and cons. As your company continues to adapt to a remote working environment, your team will definitely benefit from the multitude of productivity tools available in the market. Investing in the right productivity tools will undoubtedly increase your team’s efficiency. So, take the time to learn which ones are best for your company.

1. Unified Communications: Slack

Ensuring proper digital communication is a must. When your team has a proper avenue for communication, you will find smoother collaborations. Slack is an intra-office messaging software that aims to "simplify team communication" remotely. Its features include direct messages for focused conversations, channels for specialized topics, and video and voice calls for synchronized meetings.

What sets Slack apart from the regular communication applications is its ability to integrate the different productivity tools your team uses. You can synchronize your company’s Slack account to Asana, Dropbox, Google Calendar, Trello, Zoom, and other online apps and services. With this, your team gets better access to everything they need.

2. Online Workspace: G-Suite

Among the leading productivity tools in the market, G-Suite provides some of the most popular digital services. Its primary tools, including Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Hangouts, allow employees and employers to work together through cloud collaboration.

G-Suite Business accounts provide companies with enterprise features that are helpful for teams growing their online workplace. Unlimited cloud storage, custom e-mail domains, and other administrative tools are provided when you choose to claim a business account for a fee.

3. Project Management: Trello

Companies handling multiple projects need project management tools to sustain an organized and efficient digital workplace. A productivity tool like Trello helps ease the communication between managers and workers regarding team priorities and individual tasks.

On its website, Trello defines itself as a “collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards.” The web application draws inspiration from the Kanban method, making use of project boards, to-do lists, and cards. All these visualization tools help teams collaborate as they present to and update everyone about each project they are working on.

Although there are several project management apps in the market (e.g. like Asana, ClickUp, Microsoft Project), Trello stands out because of its straightforward interface. Even independent workers can easily maximize the features of this application; but nowadays, bigger companies typically use this productivity tool mainly for monitoring tasks.

4. Time Tracking: TMetric

As you may already know, the work-from-home arrangement requires a culture of trust among employers and employees. Sometimes, household distractions may get in the way of employees being able to focus at work. To promote good stewardship of work hours, a time tracking application might be necessary.

TMetric is the quintessential productivity tool for monitoring employee activity. The desktop app provides tracking reminders and records user activity, so you can have a clearer picture of each employee’s work progress. TMetric even creates activity and project summary reports, allowing managers to track development costs and set better project budgets.

For a more detailed progress analysis, TMetric can also integrate other productivity apps like Asana, Basecamp, GitLab, Trello, and Todoist.

5. File Sharing: DropBox

Even before COVID-19 hit, many companies and individuals have shifted towards cloud storage. Storing files online is highly convenient, as it allows multiple users to access the necessary files from anywhere.

If you are shifting more towards a remote workplace, you will need a trusted online service to store large amounts of data. DropBox is one of the most popular cloud services nowadays, as it provides huge storage for an affordable price. It also lets users co-manage files—an essential feature for collaborative work.

For convenience and accessibility, DropBox allows users to create offline changes. When enabled, the tool automatically synchronizes these changes to its cloud storage.

6. Social Media Management: Hootsuite

Now more than ever, digital marketing plays a huge role in business growth. If you have started prioritizing your social media presence to gain traction in the market, you can utilize a social media management platform like Hootsuite to sustain your activity.

Companies that rely on social media presence have long been using Hootsuite. This platform allows you to automate scheduled posts on your company’s social media accounts, so that you do not have to hover around Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter all the time.

If you opt to invest in Hootsuite paid plans, you get access to boosted content, live support, and customized analysis reports. These features will help you better strategize on how you can reach your target audience through social media. Hootsuite also allows tool integration to premium apps such as Asana, Canva, YouTube Analytics, and RSS Auto Publisher.

Find more employer insights and tips on boosting your workplace productivity at JobStreet’s Jobs and Resources Hub. If you are still on the lookout for the best candidate for your team, head to Talent Search.

At JobStreet, we believe in bringing you #JobsThatMatter. As a Career Partner, we are committed to helping all jobseekers find passion and purpose in every career choice. And as the number 1 Talent Partner in Asia, we connect employers with the right candidates who truly make a positive and lasting impact on the organization.

Discover Jobs That Matter. Visit JobStreet today.

About SEEK Asia

SEEK Asia, a combination of two leading brands JobStreet and JobsDB, is the leading job portal and Asia's preferred destination for candidates and hirers. SEEK Asia’s presence span across 7 countries namely Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam. SEEK Asia is part of the Australian Securities Exchange-listed SEEK Limited Company, the world's largest job portal by market capitalization. SEEK Asia attracts over 400 million visits a year.

About SEEK Limited

SEEK is a diverse group of companies, comprising a strong portfolio of online employment, educational, commercial and volunteer businesses. SEEK has a global presence (including Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, South-East Asia, Brazil and Mexico), with exposure to over 2.9 billion people and approximately 27 per cent of global GDP. SEEK makes a positive contribution to people’s lives on a global scale. SEEK is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, where it is a top 100 company and has been listed in the Top 20 Most Innovative Companies by Forbes