7 Essential Tools Remote Workers Need to Communicate with Their Peers

Remote working is a dream job for most people, especially millennials. Forbes revealed that 92% of millennials want to work remotely, while 87% of them want more flexibility in work hours, unlike the current 9-to-5 system.

In the next few years, millennials will be a major force in the workspace, making 75% of the global workforce and 36% of the U.S workforce by 2025. This fact alone means that the demand for remote working will only get stronger in the years to come.

So, is remote working really effective?

The Benefits of Remote Working

Like any other method, remote working has its own benefits and weaknesses. Here are some benefits of working from home:

1. Better work-life balance

Remote workers spend zero time commuting to work, which means that they have extra time to spend with their family, do their hobby, or even start a side business. On the other hand, the average office workers have to go to work early in the morning, get stuck in traffic, and then come home late in the evening.

2. Higher productivity

Because of a better work-life balance, remote workers are usually well-rested, more emotionally stable, and less stressful. As a result, remote workers are found to work more hours, take shorter breaks and fewer leaves, as well as overall to be more productive than office workers.

3. Lower cost

When working from home, employees can save a lot of their monthly costs like public transportation, gas, parking, food, and clothes. A study by CNN found that at the end of the year, remote workers on average have $4,000 more savings than office workers. This also applies to the companies, because fewer employees mean less space needed, cutting off their office rent cost.

Unfortunately, despite all of its benefits, some companies still doubt remote working’s effectivity. One of their biggest concerns is that remote workers won’t be able to communicate well with their co-workers because they’re not working in the same room.

Well, thank god that technology was invented. Today, people from all around the world can communicate easily with one another using different tools and platforms. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the top 7 tools that can help remote workers communicate smoothly with their peers.

Remote Working Tools

LastPass

Working from home demands you to use quite a lot of apps to communicate with your team members. In doing so, you are required to remember the passwords of each of those apps one by one, which can be quite overwhelming. Therefore, the first tool that you need in remote working is LastPass, a tool that can remember all of your passwords.

This tool is free and very simple to use. All you have to do is sign up, create your master password, and then install the app on your browser. From now on, every time you enter a new password, the app will remember it for you.

Google Drive

Google Drive is a great tool to share various kinds of files with your co-workers, such as Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), images, videos, and sound recordings. You can organize those files using folders and you can access it from any device as long as you’re logged on.

Moreover, Google Drive also has its own version of Microsoft Office in the form of Google Doc, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Slides. This makes it easier for remote workers to collaborate with each other because everyone on the team can make real-time edits, changes, and comments on those Google documents.

Asana

Asana is one of the best project management tools out there, not just for remote workers, but for office workers as well. This tool allows you to create a task, assign it to your team member, and then set the due date. This way, everyone on your team knows who’s in charge of a certain project and when is the deadline.

It doesn’t stop there because Asana also allows you to comment on the task, attach an image or link, as well as integrate with other software like Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, Litmus, and others. If your team consists of not more than 15 people, then you can utilize the tool for free. However, we recommend you to use the paid version to enjoy all of its awesome features.

Trello

If you like a more visually sophisticated version of Asana, you can as well try Trello. It works similarly to Asana and it’s completely free to use. You create a task, assign it to your co-worker, and set the due date. The only difference is Trello allows you to change the background of the app with tons of beautiful design templates.

If you’re running a start-up business, you don’t need to blow your budget out of the water by using fancy and expensive tools. Use tools like Trello which is free, but covers all of your basic project management needs.

Zoom

All the tools so far are great, but what if you want to hold a weekly or monthly meeting without seeing eye to eye? Don’t worry, Zoom is here to serve you. Zoom is a video conference app that can be installed both on the desktop and mobile phone.

This tool offers high-quality video and sound that allows remote workers to communicate with each other smoothly as if they’re in the same room. During the video conference, you can record the whole conversation, send a chat message to the conference members, and most amazingly, show your screen to present or teach your team about something.

Slack

Slack is almost like a combination of Whatsapp and Zoom. This tool provides a service that allows you to send messages and have video calls with your remote team members. The idea of making Slack was to eliminate the need to communicate via email, which is hard to organize and will always guarantee you a messy inbox.

The free version of this software enables you to send personal chats, create different channels (similar to groups in Whatsapp), and have a group chat with your team. While to use the voice and video call features, you need to upgrade to the paid version.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a desktop app that provides various marketing services. One of its most popular and most-used tools is the Headline Analyzer which allows marketers to create the right headline for their content. But besides Headline Analyzer, CoSchedule also has an awesome project management tool.

The project management tool by CoSchedule offers a marketing bundle that enables you to layout your marketing plan within a calendar year, manage projects, collaborate with your team members, as well as plan your blog and social media posts ahead of time. That makes this tool perfectly suits a digital marketing team that works remotely.

Wrap Up

Millennials will be the majority of workers in the near future, and they demand more companies to change from the traditional 9-to-5 system to remote working. While remote working has its fair share of benefits for both the employees and the employers, many companies still have doubts regarding remote workers’ limited ability to communicate with each other.

If this happens decades ago, it would become a very big issue. But we’re currently living in a tech-savvy world where almost nothing is impossible. Tools like Asana, Google Drive, CoSchedule, Zoom, Slack, Trello, and LastPass have made it much easier for people on different parts of the earth to communicate with each other without any problem.

About the Author

Andre Oentoro is one of the co-founders of Milkwhale, an internationally acknowledged infographic production agency. He helps businesses increase visibility on the internet with visual data and well-placed outreach campaigns.