Table of Contents
When it comes to keeping your team in contact with one another, you need the best possible apps and systems. When everyone is in the same room together, or at least in the same building, these apps help to promote the great work that you’re all doing. They help you to keep track of what everyone needs and how you can help one another. They also allow you to get help. But for the most part, they’re a way to keep things more convenient. After all, you could get up and go check with the people that share those apps with you.
For those teams who need to manage teams that work remotely, having the right apps is crucial to being able to get anything done. You want to make sure that you’re using all of the best apps possible because if you’re not, you could end up with miscommunications. You could struggle to get all of the most essential information to the people who need it. After all, you’re not able to get up and go talk to someone about a problem. Your apps and systems need to work because they’re the only thing you have. And that’s something that we understand. It’s why we created a list of the top 12 remote work tools of 2024.
How We Found the Right Systems
We know that keeping in touch with your team is crucial to your success, and we know that there are a lot of different ways that you need to be able to communicate and share information. Just having a single app to email back and forth isn’t enough anymore. You need more than that. You need systems to help you assign work, collaborate on projects, video conference, stay organized, and a whole lot more. But you also don’t have the time to trial and error your way through the hundreds and thousands of different apps that are out there.
Our team has done the trial and error for you. We went through thousands of different apps to weed out the unnecessary, the unhelpful, or the ones that just weren’t user-friendly. We scoured through the app store to find apps that we knew were going to make your life easier and help your team achieve what they needed. In the end, we narrowed it down to 12 different apps that we believe are going to make your business run more smoothly. Each of these will help you with a different task, and each will allow you to keep your team working together.
Let’s take a look at some of the best Remote Work Software available, so you can select the best fit for you and your team:
Instagantt is one of the best remote work software (gantt chart software) in the market. Instagantt, a cloud-based tool, can give you everything you need to manage your team and stay on top of everything that needs to be done. No matter how large your team is, this app will let you create schedules, assign tasks, handle workloads, and a whole lot more. It uses Gantt charts, which can even be linked up with Asana (which we’ll talk about in a moment) so that your entire team is on the same page each day. Your charts can be created in different ways, but no matter how you create them, you want to be able to keep up with your team. That’s possible here.
You can use Instagantt for managing workloads, keeping your team connected, and video conferencing. What’s even better is that it’s all customizable, so you can make sure that the way your charts are set up works for you. You can set up milestones and dependencies in your charts, create tasks and subtasks and even drag and drop different assignments to make sure everything fits in where it should. The result is a chart that keeps everyone on task and makes sure they all know what they need to do at any given time.
Some of Instagantt’s great features are:
- Timelines
- Dependencies and milestones
- Task and subtasks
- Drag & drop
- Baselines
- Critical path
- Multiple projects and workspaces
- Diverse exporting options: Excel, image and PDF
- Public snapshot sharing options
- Team collaboration options: notification and task assignment
- Custom view and custom fields
- Custom color options for progress bars
- Risk and priority
- Estimated and actual cost
- Gantt and workload view
Teamgantt is a very good option when it comes to project scheduling, as it lets users manage their projects easily and visibly. With TeamGantt you get the basics: tasks, timelines, and team assignments.What makes TeamGantt great is their understanding of the project management mentality and philosophy, and they make sure to apply it to their product. This tool offers a wholesome look of every project, their tasks, next to their deadlines and resources.
Some of TeamGantt Features:
- Baselines
- Drag&Drop
- Multiple project view in one Gantt chart
- Guest permission
This suite is a series of several different apps, and each one is going to help you stay more productive. First of all, the Google Suite is probably where your email is right now. Just about everyone has a Gmail address because they’re convenient, free, and user-friendly. On top of that, the G Suite gives you Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. All of these together help you to stay on top of everything that’s happening in your business, no matter where you happen to be.
Google Docs lets you create documents that are shared in real-time with your team. This allows everyone to collaborate on different projects and come up with ideas as a group. Google Drive lets you upload files that are created elsewhere so that the entire team can see them, or you can upload them to folders to turn in your work. Finally, Google Calendar lets you set up meetings and schedules. You can even pull dates and times directly from your email, so you never forget a thing. All of these together help you to be more productive and keep your team in sync.
When you want to keep track of projects within your team, Asana helps you to do it. This system integrates with Instagantt to make sure everyone is on the same page, and everyone is taking care of their assigned projects. It’s considered a task manager and for good reason. You get to set up and control everything from one location and make sure that the entire team is on board with it. All you have to do is create the projects and assign the tasks to each member of your team. Once they know their assignment, they can take ownership of it and make sure everything is getting done correctly.
Asana allows you to create plans in different formats to make it easier and more useful for you. It also allows you to determine different priorities, set dependencies, and map out everything into a step-by-step process. You can see where everyone is working and what tasks each person is responsible for. You can also make sure that no one on your team is overworked doing too many tasks at once. And they can always see which tasks are assigned to them or what they’re responsible for. Then they can reach out to the team about those assignments.
When you have a team working in the office, everyone clocks in and clocks out. Usually, you have a centralized timeclock that allows this to happen. But when everyone is working from home, it can be more difficult. You don’t want to just assume people are working when they should be. You want to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. That’s where TimeBilling comes in. This app will allow you to track the amount of time that your team members are spending working on different tasks in your business.
This process makes it a whole lot easier for you to bill for the different projects you’re working on as well. When you know what your team is working on and when they’re doing it, you know how to bill those hours. You know which client is going to be responsible for that period. With TimeBilling, you get not only the tracker, but you can check out a calendar to see how everything stacks up, and you can download reports so they can be turned in to clients. Plus, you can use it on any device, and you can create invoices directly from the app.
Trello has gained popularity lately as a way to keep track of all of your assignments and tasks. It’s a productivity app that you can use on your desktop or mobile device. You can use it as an individual tracker to keep track of your assignments, or your entire team can use it to assign different tasks to different people on the team. It’s also a unique system because it’s the best Kanban-style option. For those who already know and love Kanban, that’s all you probably need to know. But for those who don’t, it’s a simple system to learn.
With this system, you use cards that are assigned to a specific team or team member. When they finish their part of the job, they move the card to a different section. Then that team or team member is responsible for doing their part. As the card is moved from one row to the next, it changes responsibility. But the card itself makes it possible for everyone to see where it is, who’s working on it, or what’s being done with it. You can also use Trello for as many cards and boards as you want, so it can be scaled up for large businesses, or it can be scaled down to work for smaller companies.
Do you need a way to share information and ideas with your team? Maybe you and your team (or at least a subset of them) need to be able to communicate about different tasks, or you need to be able to collaborate on a project. If that’s the case, then Miro is an excellent option for you. You can collaborate on Google Docs in the G Suite, but Miro gives you more of a whiteboard style. This can be even easier to collaborate on because you can work everything through the phases necessary to get from the beginning of an idea to the end.
Miro gives you a place to brainstorm together and create different ideas. You can then do all of your research and design through the system. Sharing all of your information and collaborating as you go is a snap. So is creating a workflow system that uses Agile, so your team knows what’s going on as you start to nail down the specifics. When you get a little further along, you can also begin strategizing and planning out different steps or the implementation. And finally, you can use Miro for the mapping portion of really getting your plan into motion.
For those businesses that work in the software sector, it’s crucial to have a system that lets you communicate and collaborate. Other collaboration tools are great, but you need something that’s built for developers. GitHub is precisely that. It helps you collaborate with other developers through your business, or you can even create open-source areas to get creative. The key here is that it’s designed to be used for coding. That means you have access to all of the different tools you need to share that coding, rather than trying to share it in a platform that’s built for general communication.
With GitHub, you can build your software right in the app. That makes it easier for your entire team to see what’s going on and to be a part of it. You’ll be able to manage different projects directly from this system and can share with other team members just by mentioning them anywhere in the system. There are even additional apps and tools available that can make the whole process from communication to software building as easy as possible. You end up with code that works for you, and your team is kept in the loop to help.
As a designer, you need a way to get creative, and you need a way to turn that creative aspect into something physical. That’s where InVision comes in. With this app, you’re going to create every aspect of your design from the very first ideas and prototypes onward. You can start with creating ideas together on a whiteboard similar to Miro, but you’re going to have more design features than you get there. This system is built for people who are making real products that will one day sit on a shelf and be purchased.
Each member of your design team can work on their tasks and start creating their prototype ideas. They can also collaborate on their projects and get the feedback that they need to improve what they’re doing and turn it into a real product. You can collect different ideas and inspiration through your boards, and you can present everything to whoever needs to see it. You can even turn around and pass that project off to someone else so they can take over for the next phase. With this system, you can start from a sketch and turn it into something real.
When it comes to communicating with your team, you want to make sure you’re doing it the right way, right? You can communicate via Slack and keep everyone updated with chat features or through email on the G Suite. But sometimes you need to have face-to-face conversations. That doesn’t mean you need to physically be in the same room, however. Instead, Zoom allows you to have video conferences with one other person or with large groups of other people. It’s not just about a standard video conference. It’s also about hosting entire conferences or meetings for the entire team.
Zoom makes it easier to create a meeting entirely online. But what you do with those meetings is entirely up to you. You can use this system to host the phone calls that your team needs to make to other team members or clients within your business. You can use it for webinars and collaborating with your team or for having meetings with different clients. You can also use the messaging features to keep in constant contact with your team. In the end, this is a communication system that lets you stay in touch with anyone and everyone.
Remote teams can be difficult because everyone is located in a different place. If you take a local business and decide to make it a remote company, it might be easy enough to communicate with everyone because you’re in the same small area. On the other hand, if you have a large business, your employees are likely scattered around the country. They could even be scattered around the globe. That makes it more challenging to communicate with them and make sure that they’re on task and comfortable with their assignments.
Keeping up with your team and checking in on them once in a while is the best way that you can keep everyone happy and successful. That’s where Timezone.io comes in. This app lets you easily see the time zone that your different employees are working from. It then enables you to see what time they’re working and how you can collaborate with them better during these times. That way, both of you can get the help or feedback that you’re looking for, and you don’t have to worry about missing connections because of the difference in time zones.
The final tool that we have for you is Zapier. This one is unique, and it’s one that’s going to continue to become even more critical for your business overall. That’s because Zapier is all about automating different tasks that you need to perform. But it’s also about making sure you can use all of the various apps you want, easily and cohesively. After all, with all of these apps we’ve mentioned (and the thousands more out there), it’s not realistic to assume that they’re all built to interact, right? Well, if they’re not, Zapier can help you with that too.
With this app, you only need to put information in one location, and Zapier can transfer it as needed. You can link up different apps through this one, and from there, they can share information that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. This is going to make it easier and faster for everyone in your team to keep up and keep track of different tasks without having to jump back and forth between different apps to do it. That speeds up your processes and also keeps things from slipping through the cracks, which can easily happen if you’re not careful to manage each app effectively.
Conclusion time
Apps are meant to help your team improve your workflow and improve your capabilities. By using the right apps, you can speed up the amount of time it takes to communicate different thoughts, ideas, and tasks to your team. You can make it easier for them to keep track of what they need to be doing, and you can make sure everyone gets the support that they’re looking for along the way.
Different tools may make more sense for the type of business you’re in, and others may not. The most important thing is that you’re trying them out to see how they could help.
In the end, you and your team are the only ones who can decide just which apps work best for you. You want to make sure you’re creating a cohesive system that is going to make your lives easier, after all.
