The statistics demonstrate that remote workforce of the US and UK is rising very fast. Therefore, digital agencies have different needs to adapt to it and agency owners have some questions on their minds.
- How can we communicate better when everyone works remotely?
- How can we track employee performance?
- Which collaboration tools are the best to use for digital agencies?
- How can we improve the productivity of employees?
We curated some of the best remote working tools which will be answering your questions. We diverse the tools according to their target and how they will help you. Let’s start by improving your remote team’s collaboration.
Remote Collaboration & Communication Tools
Slack
Slack aims to bring your team and all your communication together. Teamwork in Slack happens in channels — a single place for messaging, tools and files — helping everyone save time and collaborate together.
Channels can be divided up by team, project or client. It all depends on you. It gives you flexibility and saves you from lengthy email chains. Especially for agencies, sharing channels with clients is a crucial feature to notice. You can bring all the right people into the same room.
You can integrate your other remote working tools to Slack. The Slack App Directory has over 2,000 apps you can integrate into Slack. It allows you to spend less time juggling tabs and more time focusing on meaningful work.
Basecamp
The popular project management tool, Basecamp can be one of the best remote working tools. Because remote work is especially challenging when stuff’s spread out across emails, file services, task managers, spreadsheets, chats, meetings, etc. Things get lost, you don’t know where to look for stuff, and people put the right information in the wrong place.
Basecamp gets all these together. So you don’t need to search where everything is, understand what everyone’s working on, and know exactly where to put the next thing everyone needs to know about. Your team can access Basecamp from anywhere – on the web, on iOS, and Android. This is the modern way – The Basecamp Way to Work.
Knowing those founders of the Basecamp working remotely for the whole project improve the trust of the tool. It means they know all the challenges of remote working and they built those learnings into Basecamp.
Trello
Trello, a diverse tool for project management for remote teams. It’s an all-in-one hub for your team – simple yet robust. Also, Trello integrates well with all your other favorite apps, like Google Drive, Slack, Jira, and more. It provides a free version too.
Evernote for Business
I’m sure that most of the readers know Evernote as an online note-taking app and that’s it. Evernote for Business‘ aim is to bring your team’s work together! With the remote project management tools to create visibility into projects, workflows, and deadlines. Still, the main feature of Evernote makes the tool special. Evernote Business allows teammates to access, edit, upload, and share notes and files from any device—even if they’re offline.
Figma – For Design Teams
Figma gets best defined as an interface design tool that allows several designers to collaborate. This collaboration occurs in real-time. It works well when you have several project stakeholders who get engaged in managing the result. Designers can choose from the paid and free versions of the tool.
Figma has several useful features for remote design teams! One of the best features is that the tool operates on a cross-platform basis. Designers can use it for generating icons and will find it working seamlessly. They can learn more about the tool and its collaborative capacity in no time. The tool allows designers to share the graphics with other designers through an app. Whe we asked them designers from award-winning agencies predicted the rise of team collaboration tools for web design in 2020.
Planable – For Social Media Teams
Marketing on social media will always be a task for at least someone in the team. It’s doesn’t have to be complicated and should be easy to manage remotely. Planable is here to help with that.
Social media is about making things fun and easy. You don’t have to create the social media plan in a spreadsheet, then send an email to team members to ask for feedback and attach files from your G Drive or Dropbox.
It’s easy to do everything in one place if you use one platform such as Planable offering an effective social media content collaboration for digital agencies. So your client and other team members can view how the posts will look like on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter etc. They can give their feedbacks easily.
Performance Tracking & Productivity Tools
I Done This
I Done This will help you to get your team in-sync. Agencies use the performance tracking tool for easy daily check-ins and powerful progress reports to run more effective and productive teams. Especially it’s essential for remote teams. With robust reports of the performance tracking tool, you will get a high-level view of your whole team or organization’s progress over time. Their aim is to make the teams better!
Time Doctor
Time Doctor is an employee time tracking software that helps you and your team. Time Doctor’s reports will give you detailed insights into which websites are being used and for how long. You can access these reports online, and can also receive them weekly by email. The adaption period can be easier for remote working with Time Doctor.
It doesn’t only help with monitoring your employees. So, 20% of the benefits of the software come from the monitoring features. The other 80% come from empowering your staff to manage their own time more effectively, and from providing you with higher-level insights into how time is spent in your organization. These insights will enable you improve processes in your business so that it runs more efficiently.
Toggl
Always getting distracted? Use Toggl as your productivity tool. A simple time tracker with powerful reports and it works across all your devices. You can use the performance tracking software as an individual or you can turn your team on to productivity with Toggl the time tracker. For digital agencies, hours calculation is essential for following the money and optimize the time of the team.
As an individual you can also break down your hours by projects, clients and tasks to see what’s making you money, and what’s holding you back.
Todoist
Todoist allows you to use different colors for every project for which you can also create child projects. You can also arrange your projects anyhow you want with the drag-and-drop feature in a matter of seconds. These well-implemented features make it one of the best remote working tools for 2020.
This to-do list app also allows you to collaborate on projects and assign tasks to your colleagues on your team or people you work with. You can find more comprehensive project management tools here.
Video Call & Conference Tools
Zoom
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars.
It allows multiple participants can share their screens simultaneously and co-annotate for a more interactive meeting. You can focus on your meeting and don’t need to think about note-taking part. If you record your meetings, then you can find what you are looking for with Zoom’s auto-generated, searchable transcripts.
Skype
Hundreds of millions people use Skype to chat and call every day. Of course, most of it is not business calls but still, we can admit Skype is the most popular video call software.
With Skype’s features, you can ace your interview from anywhere and anytime. Find features suitable for your digital agency and rock your interview on Skype.
Google Hangouts Meet
Google Hangouts Meet is part of the G Suite office productivity platform and targets to provide a world-class video call & conferencing service.
Meet takes the headaches out of joining a video call at work. Just set up a meeting and share a link. No worrying about whether teammates, clients, or customers have the right accounts or plug-ins. With a fast, lightweight interface and smart participant management, multi-person video calls are a breeze.
Other Remote Working Tools for Digital Agencies
We want to list a few more tools that we found interesting. The features which we want to emphasize for these remote working tools are not fitting exactly any of the categories above.
Notion
Notion is an all-in-one workspace for digital agencies. What makes it unique is its knowledge bases. Your team has a culture, has a common workflow, etc. How you will make the orientation process of new employees faster when working remotely? Notion can be your central source of truth.
Need a wiki? Notion is easy to edit, and even easier to organize and maintain. All your essential company information stays in one place.
Feedly
Industry news is crucial for digital marketing agencies. Your team always needs to stay updated for a quickly evolving digital world. When all the team works together at the office, all of the team members get the latest information from someone more easily. Therefore, a tool for helping everyone get the news is crucial for remote teams. Feedly makes this process easier.
Feedly is a content curation tool that allows you to collect and read content from your favorite blogs or news site, subscribe to any RSS feed and most importantly, curate content for social sharing which you can either save or share directly from your Feedly user interface.
Loom
When working remotely, Loom can save you from typing long emails and unnecessary video conferences. With Loom, you can capture your screen, voice, and face and instantly share your video in less time than it would take to type an email.
Maybe you don’t need Loom to record yourself but this perfect tool for remote working makes the process a lot quicker for digital marketing agencies. You can instantly share your video and make the edits online. Loom is encouraging you to be more expressive.
Airtable
Reasons can be different but not everyone doesn’t have to like Google Spreadsheets for handling their tasks. Airtable makes real-time collaboration in a smarter way.
Part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible, Airtable gives you the freedom to arrange your work just the way you like. Also, you can find many templates with their use cases on their website.
It handles any content you throw at them. All team members can add attachments, long text notes and checkboxes.
Chimp or Champ
It’s hard to monitor your employees’ happiness level when working remotely. Chimp or Champ is a weekly anonymous employee happiness meter for you to check your team pulse, improve employee well-being.
Remote working can be a lot more effective with these powerful tools. They will help you stay connected with your team and get things done.
All of the remote working tools for digital agencies we’ve reviewed in this article serve different purposes. However, all of them can improve the performance of your agency by establishing a collaborative workflow and maximizing productivity.
