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As coronavirus, or COVID-19, continues to spread across the globe, companies everywhere are feeling the pain at increasingly high levels. Especially, businesses related to hospitality and tourism, air travel, manufacturing, and small business.
In an effort to best protect their workplace, more and more businesses are asking their employees to work from home. These flexible workplace policies offer more control over when, where, and how an employee works and no, it doesn’t hurt business performance. Instead, such remote policies can often lead to less stressed and more satisfied employees.
“By implementing flexible working arrangements, you are not just eliminating the possibility of transmission at the office but also during commute. This is especially so for densely populated cities such as Hong Kong where you are literally inches away from someone’s face in the MTR during peak hours,” said Adrian Tan, a veteran HR practitioner and APAC leader of PeopleStrong.
Businesses must keep communication flowing with their customers, employees, and suppliers about how the company is handling the crisis in order to avoid disruption to daily operations.
Managing Staff Remotely: The Complete Guide (eBook)
In this free eBook, we highlight everything you need to effectively manage your remote employees. From communication tips to engagement ideas and more, this guide is filled with all the information needed to make remote work a success.
There are many online tools that can make it easier for business owners, managers, and CEOs to manage their employees remotely.
Remote Online Tools to Help Your Business Manage the Coronavirus Crisis
Employee communication solutions
The best and free employee management app
Connecteam’s free employee management app lets you take control of unfolding events: keep 100% of your team informed in real-time, distribute important information and protocols, stay up to date with instant reports from the field, enforce compliance and more.
You can send real-time updates and push notifications like a breaking announcement that can’t wait, a message from the CEO or an operational update. Easily introduce protocol libraries and important guidelines while overseeing its execution with “read and sign” reports. Introduce dedicated reporting channels and automate the information flow and finally, share resources and train your team with Connecteam’s dedicated templates and media capabilities to share your prevention plan guidelines, videos, text, files, and images.
Price: Connecteam has a free for life plan with all features available and you can upgrade to a Premium plan at any time, pricing starts at just $29/month for up to 30 users.
Stay in Control of Your Business With Connecteam
Be prepared, be proactive and control the narrative. Connecteam lets you take control of unfolding events: keep 100% of your team informed in real-time, distribute important information and protocols, stay up to date with instant reports from the field, enforce compliance and more.
“Understanding this is a time of need, we have put together a plan for businesses that wish to be prepared for a potential outbreak in their organization. Our team is dedicated and ready to help every organization do a quick roll-out for a communication platform that will allow organizations to communicate, share knowledge and stay up-to-date even in case of an outbreak or remote working conditions,” said Amir Nehemia, Connecteam’s CEO.
“As we understand the dysfunction with coronavirus for businesses, we are prepared to launch such solutions in a matter of 48 hours, and share our knowledge and insight to offer businesses the best tools and advice for dealing with this crisis.”
The remote project management and team collaboration software
ProofHub’s project management software brings all your projects, teams and communications together. With its powerful features, it replaces the many tools you otherwise use to manage your team remotely.
Add tasks with deadlines and assign them to team members. Create custom workflows using Kanban boards. Communicate with your team members and collaborate in real-time. ProofHub also streamlines the review process by letting you share files, annotate them using markup tools and comment on files. Create custom reports by selecting parameters of your choice to make project and resource planning more efficient. ProofHub also integrates with your favorite third-party apps like Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox.
Price: ProofHub offers a free trial and you can upgrade to its Ultimate Control plan with unlimited users and projects at $89/month.
The best hi-tech communication app
Small teams that are hi-tech find Slack as a perfect solution for their communication needs. Thanks to its unique interface, Slack is best known as an enterprise messaging and collaboration app. Many know Slack for its superb integration capabilities but is also includes one-on-one and group chat, audio calls and video conferencing. To get started, you need an employee’s email address to invite them to join Slack.
Price: There is a free plan. After which you pay $6.67/month for the Standard plan, $12.50/month for the Plus plan, and you’ll need to chat to a representative if you need the Enterprise solution.
Video chat
The best online meeting platform
Create your remote office with Kaltura so you can quickly get up and running with online meetings, virtual training rooms, webinars, virtual classrooms and more. Kaltura Meetings allows for an experience that goes beyond a traditional video call – with collaborative whiteboards, chat and file sharing.
All of Kaltura’s features make it easier for your business to increase sales, drive collaboration, simplify onboarding, support clients, boost communication, spread knowledge, and more.
Price: Contact a sales representative to get a custom package quote to power your video needs. There is also a free 30-day trial.
The best modern enterprise video communications
Meetings, video webinar, conference rooms, phony system, and chat are some of Zoom’s strongest features. All of the plans on Zoom allow up to 100 participants by default in every meeting that you host (up to 500 with Large Meeting add-on). Additionally, you can host an unlimited number of meetings but if you are looking to have more than one meeting concurrently, then you will need additional host licenses. Just know that the free plan has a meeting cap of 40 minutes which can still help, especially as cutting meeting time keeps everyone engaged.
Price: There is a free plan, Pro at $14.99/month/host, $19.99/month/host (starting at 10 hosts for $199.90/month) or the Enterpise plan that starts at 100 hosts for $1,999/month.
File collaboration
The best cloud file collaboration
Drive is perfect for remote teams as it’s available on a secure cloud-based platform so you can easily share, store, and access files. From document creation, cloud storage, top Priority search, file sharing, and collaboration, Drive lets you do it all more quickly and easily.
Price: If this is for personal use then it’s free for the first 15 GB. Otherwise, the Business version costs $8/month per active user and $1 per 25 GB.
Other favorites
The best remote desktop sharing
Access your computer securely from any device and screen share with teammates for stronger collaboration. It’s as simple as downloading the extension on your Chrome account.
Price: Free.
The best noise canceling app
Just click one button and all the background noise from you to other call participants and also from call participants to you is removed. Remote teams can have efficient and productive talks while also being more professional by holding noiseless conference calls.
Price: There is a free plan for remote workers otherwise team pricing starts at $7/month.
The best productivity tracker
If you’re looking to boost productivity, then Toggl is for you. “The simplest time tracker to help you get things done. Ideal for teams, freelancers & agencies.” Just push a button and the software will break down the numbers and data is easy to read so you know where you stand. In addition, the Toggl Button browser extension makes it easy to track time in over 80 online tools.
Price: Pricing starts at $9/month/per user, $18/month/per user, or chat with a representative about their Enterprise plan.
Managing Staff Remotely: The Complete Guide (eBook)
In this free eBook, we highlight everything you need to effectively manage your remote employees. From communication tips to engagement ideas and more, this guide is filled with all the information needed to make remote work a success.
Remote work is on the rise
A recent survey taken at the Global Leadership Summit in London reported that 34% said more than half of their company’s workforce will be working remotely by 2020. Even without this growing crisis, remote work has become more appealing to many companies worldwide as it offers more flexibility and greater employee happiness. If remote work is to continue to grow, as the statistics say it is, then companies need to ensure their employees are equipped with the best tools to effectively manage their time and execute their tasks while at home.
Reach out to our team to learn even more about our communication solution.