Tag Archive for: managing remote teams

Remote Work And Apps: 5 Reasons Why You Need One

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The remote work revolution is well underway as we enter the post-COVID-19 era. Small businesses, massive enterprises, and government institutions realize that the old way of doing business is no longer feasible. With a shift towards environmental sustainability and more employees preferring to work from home — remote work is here to stay!

Furthermore, all organizations benefit from reducing their floor space, which inevitably reduces rental and energy costs. And as they streamline their operations, they can tap into a vast talent pool. With the right kinds of apps, it’s possible to work effectively with employees, contractors, and freelancers spread across the country or the globe. 

Below, we unveil why you need remote work apps and how your business can benefit from these.

1. Remote Work Apps Help Your Team Stay Organized

It may seem challenging to keep your team organized when they’re in different locations and time zones, right? That may have been a problem over a decade ago, but that’s no longer the case. Take Trello as an example, a web-based application ideal for managing projects and facilitating collaboration between team members.

The app’s easy-to-learn Kanban-style list-making features and intuitive Trello boards and cards help get everyone on the same page. And while it’s not suitable for massive projects, it’s ideal for smaller projects and organizations. Furthermore, Trello is also available as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

2. Video Conferencing Apps Keep Your Team Connected

All remote work teams need reliable video conferencing apps. After all, it’s necessary to have those face-to-face conversations and meetings at a regular cadence. Fortunately, there are many good video conferencing platforms available. One could even say that there are too many options in this space. 

Apps such as BlueJeans, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Slack, Webex by Cisco, and Whereby are only a few of the options available. On top of that, the privacy-respecting browser Brave has introduced Brave Talk, which is a viable video conferencing alternative.

3. Email Remains Essential For Remote Work 

No organization can run effectively without email. It’s the ultimate tool for communicating with on-site staff, remote workers, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. And considering the speed, reliability, and relative security offered by email protocols, it’s no wonder that email remains so popular today. 

And there are also many excellent email clients and platforms available such as Gmail, iOS Mail, K-9 Mail, Microsoft Outlook, ProtonMail, Spark, and TypeApp mail.

4. Cloud Storage Services Improve Workflow

As with email, no organization can function effectively without cloud storage and file-sharing services. If you’ve ever wondered why services such as Dropbox and Google Drive are so popular, it’s because there’s hardly an organization that doesn’t need to store and share digital files on the cloud. 

Moreover, these services make it incredibly easy and quick for remote work teams to share and update almost any type of file in real-time. And that helps keep teams in sync since they don’t have to wait long durations to access mission-critical files. 

5. The Code Repository Has Become Indispensable 

Tech companies and developers use code repositories daily. And that makes sense, as it’s an effective way to keep source code and the associated documentation safe. Furthermore, it simplifies the collaborative process between remote development teams and tracking any code changes.

But even non-tech companies that need to maintain and update code also need to use repositories. And in this area, there are several good options available such as Apache Subversion, BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab, and SourceForge.

In Conclusion

With the plethora of excellent remote work apps in the marketplace, there’s no reason for any organization to be left behind. And while most organizations will use web-based apps, Android and iOS versions are available for remote workers that rely on their mobile devices. Contact NS804 to learn how we’ll help you build powerful apps to empower remote work teams worldwide!

Improving Remote Team Communication For Remote Workers

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Improving Communication and Collaboration for Remote Workers

The digital era saw a hyper acceleration through COVID-19 and the events of 2020. Because of the pandemic and the major shift toward a digital era, remote workers and remote staff quickly became the norm. This subsequently forced businesses and organizations to embrace a digital world with remote workers. Before the pandemic, there was already a lot of buzz and excitement around the future of remote work. In fact, some companies like NomadX sought out to create entire business plans based around planning travelling work trips for the remote-worker. In any case, whether prepared for the digital era or not, the transition started in the blink of an eye.

Now, remote work and remote workers seem absolutely normal. As if it were always the way things were. However, many organizations and businesses are still adjusting to the new remote landscape and digital economy. And the companies that were already in position for a digital transition, are still looking for ways to improve their current remote-work environment.

One of the most important aspects in a business is communication; internal communication between teams, external communications with partners, suppliers, and consumers, and internal communication between staff and management as well. Especially in a remote-work-environment, then, prioritizing effective and efficient communication tools is more than necessary.

Keeping Remote Workers Looped In

Remote workers need to be able to communicate. Plain and simple as that. Yet, communication can mean a lot of things; and in today’s world businesses utilize everything from social media platforms, to email, IM, and phone calls to correspond and communicate. Therefore, building a suite of communication tools that keeps your remote staff in the loop is a daunting task.

When addressing the communication solutions for your remote workers it’s important that you keep their needs, workflows, and operations in mind. You don’t want to give a carpenter a painters toolbox and the same applies to your remote workers. Building an enterprise application from scratch for your organization won’t only help you customize the features and tools that your remote staff can access; but will also lead to boosted efficiency and higher rates of productivity from your staff.

Encouraging Communication

While developing your enterprise business application to address the communication needs of your remote workers; consider push notifications to encourage and boost communication efforts between team members. By enabling push notifications at a reasonable rate, your enterprise application will become more than a simple business tool. Rather, it will add value to the c0-worker relationships that exist and develop within your firm, boost productivity, and lead to higher rates of efficiency from your team.

In addition to boosting important business KPIs; having an organization-wide enterprise application for communication supports team-building and team bonding. By acting as a medium and platform for digital and remote team-building exercises, by investing in a custom enterprise application, you’re really investing in the people of your firm.

Wrapping Up

The era of the remote workers is upon us, and it isn’t going anywhere soon. Even with vaccinations rolling out world-wide, the pillar of remote work is likely here permanently.

For more information on managing remote workers, enterprise application solutions, or anything else app development, keep browsing NS804.

Garnering and Implementing Feedback From Remote Teams

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Developing Stronger Remote Teams Through Feedback

Feedback is an important element in any cycle. Especially in the context of business. Whether that feedback be between an employee and manager, between two colleagues, or from a company to a consultant; feedback is both necessary and valuable. In the last year, remote teams and remote staff quickly became the norm. This was, partially, due to the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and an economy already moving toward a digital age. Regardless of how we got here, though, here we are. By embracing newly established normals and the transition to a more remote workforce; it remains important to foster a comfortable, welcoming, and productive company culture.

One tactic managers and business leaders can use to nurture a functional culture, even remotely, is employee feedback. Employee feedback from remote teams is will highlight issues and problem areas in operations that could be easily overlooked by other staff with less intimate knowledge of that specific task or business activity. By encouraging employee feedback from your remote staff, however, your team opens the channel of communication allowing management and remote teams to address persistent issues together.

Build Feedback Forms Into Your Custom Enterprise App for Remote Teams

With the entire economy embracing the digital era; many companies have invested in custom enterprise applications. These applications serve a variety of functions depending on the company and their specific needs, but many of them contain a strong focus on internal and external communication. However, these custom enterprise applications also offer a rich opportunity to further cement the lines of feedback between the company and its personnel. For instance, companies can build feedback forms directly into their enterprise applications. The forms can provide anonymity to users who submit, and can be a platform for feedback of any kind.

By presenting your staff and remote teams with conveniently provided feedback forms, there’s a much higher chance that those forms be utilized. This is also the case with anonymity. Often-times, employees and staff (humans in general really), are nervous or timid about bringing forward issues in the workplace. Whether those issues are strictly operational, or deal with colleagues and co-workers; regardless, remote teams need a clear and concise way to deliver feedback to their employers, managers, and organizational leaders.

Listen, Implement, Benefit

By taking the time to listen to your remote teams and remote staff; problems within operations, innovations, and other workplace conflicts will be more evident. While airing dirty laundry, so to speak, is never exactly fun; letting it fester is much worse. By hearing your remote staff and actually implementing solutions to the feedback provided, your organization will develop longer-lasting relationships with more loyal employees.

Right now, building a reliable and dedicated staff of remote employees and remote teams will bring long-term sustainability and long-term value to your organization. The era of remote work is far from over, by creating a superb remote company culture now; your team will attract higher-tier-talent down the line.

Wrapping Up

Feedback from managers to employees is vital. Feedback, also, from employees to managers and organizational leaders is vital. Show your remote teams and remote workers that you truly are dedicated to creating a culture around them by cultivating, hearing, and implementing solutions to feedback provided.

For more information on custom enterprise application development, or anything else related to app development, keep browsing NS804’s content library.

Improving Remote Team Collaboration

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Further Improving Remote Team Collaboration

2020 has officially closed the door and we’re all-aboard moving forward. However, while hope is shining bright, a lot of the change from 2020 is likely here to stay. For example, the remote team, and the entire work from home environment will probably be the standard for the foreseeable future. As such, it’s important that managers, companies, and work-teams have the tools they need to successfully work remotely. On top of that, employees still need to feel connected, and projects need to be accomplished.

Pre-existing Options

In terms of remote team collaboration tools there are plenty to choose from. This is because working from home and the digital era were already well on their way. Although the events of 2020 certainly advanced those societal shifts. There are several options, though, already on the market for remote work teams.

These options range from popular communication applications like Slack to Zoom. Zoom is the app that historically rocked the charts last year. Slack is an internal communications application and instant messenger. Companies can use Slack to set up internal work-channels, establish direct lines of communication between staff members or groups of staff members, and offers other features as well.

Zoom, as we all know too well, is the popular video conferencing application that has been used by businesses and citizens alike. Zoom made it easy and accessible for anyone to video-chat with anyone. This allowed for businesses to keep lines of communication open all across the globe.

Develop A Custom Enterprise App

An alternate solution to employee communication and connection is to develop your own custom app. Developing a custom enterprise application benefits the remote team as well as your business as a whole. Having a custom enterprise app offers more customization to the suit of features included. This is good for you business and the remote teams they work with.

A custom enterprise application could combine the instant-chat features of Slack with the video-conferencing ability of Zoom to create an all-in-one solution. A solution specific to your business.

Team Building Exercises For the Remote Team

Another aspect of managing remote teams is to continue conducting team-building exercises. While the team may not be able to gather in conference room F anymore, there is still a virtual landscape that allows for employees to meet up and connect. For instance, one strong team building exercise can be a remote-dungeons-and-dragons campaign. The remote team can link up via applications such as Roll20 and have fun solving puzzles, overcoming obstacles, and most of all – blowing off steam and cracking jokes.

However, there’s a whole library of team building exercises you can choose from that fit your people.

Consistently Scheduled Collaboration

This is a balance. The goal here is to increase regularly scheduled collaboration while reducing everyday meetings. Giving employees a time and platform through which they can flush out ideas and collaborate on projects is good way to replace draining status meetings and other types of regular daily meetings. Instead, give your staff the chance to collaborate freely.

Wrapping Up

Empowering your remote team to succeed is a combination of equipping them with the software and technology required, as well as maintaining morale and promoting team-bonding.

For more tips on remote team management, or to explore a custom enterprise application, visit NS804 today.

The Ultimate Guide To Managing Remote Teams

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The Ultimate Guide To Managing Remote Teams During and Post COVID-19

The impact of COVID-19 is far from over. In fact, we don’t yet know how far into the future the effects of COVID-19 will be seen. Some would say forever. Whether or not this proves true, one thing is certain: the shift to a remote workforce and the digital age is in a period of rapid acceleration. Therefore, businesses and organizations all across the globe have been making the shift to a remote workforce. With that shift, however, there are new workflows. New communication tools. And other new tactics that your company needs for managing remote teams.

First and foremost, with a remote workforce there are certain perks your company can use to their advantage. For instance, when managing a remote team, your company can utilize a much more flexible schedule. With employees at home, there isn’t as much pressure or urgency to get things done in a certain timeframe; and therefore tasks can be accomplished throughout the entire span of the day, and even into the night, without staff feeling overwhelmed.

A Decrease In Time-Wasters Improves Efficiency

Additionally, a decrease in “time-wasting” activities that only affected in-person staff improves efficiency. One such example is the commute to-and-from-work. Without a daily commute, employees are able to spend more time with their families and in their own home. This, therefore, leads to a stronger sense of work-life-balance, and a happier employee overall.

On average, remote employees are happier and have a better sense of work-life-balance, which usually leads to stronger performances at work. The mood of a staff-member directly affects their productivity, meaning that in the case of managing a remote team, your staff, on average, could have a significantly higher rate of productivity.

Understanding Expectations When Managing Remote Teams

When hiring or transitioning to a remote workforce, one of the core principles is to establish expectations. This is the same as it would be with in-person workers. However, it’s important to have a clear understanding of expectations from the very beginning when managing remote teams. While communication is important in every relationship context, it is specifically vital to managing a remote team. There is a lot of nuance to communication in-person. Between body-language and other non-verbals. However, most communication in a remote environment is non-visual. Hence why communication is so vital to managing remote teams.

Additionally, since many companies are utilizing more flexible scheduling with remote teams; it’s logical that expectations need to be set on both sides of the coin. These details should include things like time-commitment, weekly tasks, compensation, and everything else that would define the employees role and their relationship to the company.

Emphasizing Communication

As discussed above, communication is an integral aspect to any and every relationship. No matter the context. In managing remote teams, communication is more than essential. It truly is a vital aspect of successful teams working remotely. Correspondingly, then, it goes to reason that companies shifting to a remote workforce would want to implement business applications for communication. There are a myriad of business applications that your company can choose to use for communicating internally and externally.

Internally speaking, Slack is extremely popular as a part instant-messaging and part-email communication solution. Zoom is another company that has blown up astronomically since the onset of the pandemic. With global companies, domestic companies, and everyone in between needing reliable and consistent video conferencing capability; Zoom saw an unbelievable amount of growth in 2020, and set some records for themselves while at it.

There are many other internal communication solutions that you can implement for your remote staff, and even softwares that allow you to set up incentives for your team. This lets the culture of your company thrive even in a remote setting post COVID-19. Some incentive-based-softwares for remote teams are all managed by the leaders and decision makers, while others encourage and promote inter-colleague connections.

In other words, colleagues and co-workers can reward each other on a job well done with an internal currency that can then be redeemed for prizes, gifts, vacations, or even donated to a charity of the recipients choice. These are all great solutions to keep your company culture alive, and incentivize your remote staff to keep working hard and hitting goals.

Providing Some Structure When Managing Remote Teams

While flexible schedules and a stronger sense of work-life-balance are great; business is business, and work needs to get done. To help provide some structure to your remote staffs workweek or work-day, and to ensure that tasks are being accomplished managers and team leaders can schedule regular check-ins.

These check-ins might mimic the exact structure of a daily or weekly check-in that you’d conduct in the office. The only difference being that these check-ins occur remotely. Whether that be via a phone call, or a quick video-chat, a swift one-on-one with each of your remote workers is a great way to not only connect about work, but also get to know your workers and ensure they’re doing okay during these trying times.

Encourage Team Building and Team Bonding

Just because the world is shifting to a digital age and a majorly remote workforce, doesn’t mean that team members can’t connect and bond with one another. There are plenty of options for managers overseeing remote work teams who are looking for ways to bond the team. Some examples might be a virtual film-showing, or a remote happy-hour. Another popular choice is the remote pizza party.

However, while there’s nothing wrong with any of the above choices, staff and employees often enjoy trying something new. Being creative with team bonding exercises has gotten a little harder with the pandemic limiting so many options. Yet, where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the old saying goes.

For instance, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) can be an excellent team-building and team-bonding activity. For starters, D&D is all about a group working together, and usually overcoming a few character flaws or group-issues as well. But beyond that, good D&D campaigns, or even one-shots, require the team to think outside the box, put together some creative solutions, and ultimately work together. All in the context of having a good time, and maybe a few drinks.

Use Project Management Tools

While there are some differences and adaptations to managing remote teams, there are some similarities too. For instance, your managers can likely use the same project management software or project management tools that they were using in person. Transitioning to a remote use of these project management softwares is really simple, and they are already built for it, making it an easy and simple transition.

Using project management software when managing remote teams will allow you to set daily and weekly to-do lists, and share updates on project timelines with the whole team.

Wrapping Up

The world is changing rapidly. The shift to a virtual age and a digital workforce is upon us. Many companies are already prepared for the remote environment. Many others are preparing for the shift. Either way, it’s important to be able to properly manage a remote work team and remote customers.

For more information on the shift to the digital age, or managing remote teams, visit NS804 today.

Must Have Apps For Managing Remote Teams

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Managing Remote Teams With Must Have Apps

The shift toward a digital age has been long in the works, however, 202 has accelerated that transition. This is, in part, due to COVID-19 and the way that our society has shifted to limit person-to-person contact. As such, companies have had to embrace the digital age as well. This has brought many to adopt a variety of applications for managing remote teams.

As with any new process or system, there are challenges that come with managing remote teams. For example, one challenge that companies must address in managing remote teams is keeping communication channels open. Many companies have addressed communication challenges with multiple apps.

Solving Communication Challenges

Communication has always been an integral aspect of business. However, as the transition to the digital age continues communication’s role is becoming even more emphasized. One of the most popular apps in 2020 was Zoom. The digital-conferencing and video-calling features have helped communication lines stay alive across the country and even the world. Likewise, they’ve helped professionals in managing remote teams and staying connected both internally and externally. This is significantly important as Zoom has set a variety of user-records in 2020 with an astronomical growth spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerated shift into the digital age.

Beyond using Zoom, Slack is another extremely popular application for communication. Slack works as both an email-replacement and an instant-messaging platform for internal business purposes. It’s a great application as it offers users the ability to create and manage multiple channels. Then those channels are populated by team-specific personnel. Administration can limit and control access as well, making sure that only the right people are involved in the right conversations.

Additionally, companies still need to successfully manage projects. Zoom is great for holding and hosting meetings. Slack is a strong collaboration and internal communication solution for teams. Trello, however, remains a strong project-management software. Trello allows for easy scheduling and tracking of project progress. This keeps everyone on the same page. Simultaneously, these three applications in concert makes managing remote teams easier.

The final aspect of communication that businesses and companies need to rely on is document sharing. While there are plenty of options for mass-document sharing, and file-sharing solutions one of the most prominent is the Google-Docs Suite. Using Google Docs, professionals can share access to important files like proposals, and presentations, spreadsheets, and any type of document you might need to create.

Wrapping Up

The application industry has taken off during 2020. Specifically, this is because of the reliance that the business community has had on communication solutions. Zoom is an extremely popular video-conferencing software that businesses use to conduct video-calls, Slack is a great collaboration tool for internal teams. Meanwhile, Trello and Google Suites tackle the project-management and file-sharing aspects of managing remote teams.

In addition to keeping communication channels wide open and operating smoothly, there are even more applications that managers and team-leaders can use to promote team-bonding and team building. One great example of this is using Dungeons and Dragons as a team-building exercise. And with the development of Roll20, even this can be taken remote.

Of course, even beyond all of these solutions, custom apps are still widely in use as well. For more information on managing remote teams and communication solutions, visit NS804 today.