Remote workers are quickly becoming a staple of modern companies. Organizations are encouraging personnel to achieve a positive balance between their lives and their work. Because of this trend, workers have less anxiety and their households can thrive.
Apart from being beneficial to employees, however, this approach widens an organization’s potential pool of talent. It also increases productivity around the clock, especially when staff members are clocking in from various time zones.
All the same, a distributed workforce raises concerns for firms that are dipping their toe in for the first time. How do you manage a team of individuals who are working in different parts of the world? This is a big change for companies that are used to supervising people who are working in the same room. Thankfully, modern technology is geared towards a modern workforce, and this includes distributed workers.
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Here’s a list of tools that makes managing a distant workforce relatively easier:
1. Mobile Device Management for Remote Workers
Mobile device management, or MDM, gives remote staffers both the security and freedom they need to work efficiently without compromising business information. Because it relies on permission-based security, managers are able to regulate remote access while enabling employees to use smart devices as normal. The company can either consider asking employees to use their own gadgets, or they can issue company-owned devices for greater ownership and governance.
In the case of company-owned devices, you can take steps to prolong your investment in technology. For instance, Samsung Galaxy Note 8 cases, iPhone X cases, and cases for other upcoming and current smartphones are at the disposal of businesses. These cases help to protect company-owned smartphones from wear and tear as remote employees use them on different sites.
Likewise, protective cases for Dell, HP, and other brands can protect company-owned laptops. New models of protective accessories are built with soft TPU construction. TPU stands for thermoplastic polyurethane. It’s a hybrid material that is dense and very smooth. As a matter of fact, the same technology gives some athletic shoes greater impact protection.
2. Asana for Project Management
With a distributed workforce, it can be a challenge to keep tabs on ongoing projects. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Tools like Asana can provide you with a wealth of information about projects. Users can even filter what will appear in the tool’s dashboard by team member or project. In addition, Asana allows users to attach files from Dropbox, Google Drive, or PC to any project, so managers can send detailed briefings to remote workers with ease.
Asana addresses companies’ concern about the preservation of confidentiality for sensitive information as well. This concern, of course, increases when a company has a remote workforce in place. If an employee loses his or her device, for example, the company could lose the entirety of its data. However, with Asana all data is transferred and stored via the cloud.
3. Timesheets.com for Billable Hours for Remote Workers
If you’ve contracted remote workers at an hourly rate, it’s important to get a handle on the time they are actually working on a particular site. Fortunately, it is possible to track an employee’s time by project or by the hour with an employee management suite by Timesheets.com. You can also use it to track time off and note reimbursable bills. Additionally, managers can download HR docs such performance reviews.
Remote workers can record hourly time by using Timesheets.com; they just have to clock in. Further, the tool provides features beyond conventional time-tracking techniques. It improves accuracy, minimizes payroll size, and saves time. For example, with this tool, companies can easily manage payroll regardless of where employees are working from.
With these tools, managing a remote workforce will be a whole lot easier.