Until a few years ago, remote work was considered less paid, but now working from home is a new reality for everyone and it’s becoming a full-time career. People all over the world do big steps in organizing their work remotely. Corona Virus spread has locked us in our homes and we have to protect ourselves and to manifest a civic spirit.

How Corona Virus can impact our work lives as developers?

• No more office meetings;
• No more clients meetings;
• No more brainstorming;
• No more socialisation;
• Anxiety caused by news about the virus;
• Losing time by getting distracted.

But! Good news, guys, thanks to the digital work tools we can work remotely and be more productive and happy than we usually are. 

How To Manage Remote Teams in 2020?

Managing remote teams is becoming the necessity of the hour. As a project manager, it’s up to you how to achieve success with your team. 

According to Google Trends the popularity of remote work tools from March 2020 increased sufficiently. So as you see it’s a growing trend for remote work and tools to manage it. Now we want to show you the remote team tools that will simplify the process to manage remote workers keeping them productive and growing professionally. Here we go:)

1. Slack – for remote messaging

Thanks to Slack you can easily communicate with your colleagues, create different chats, share documents. It has both mobile and desktop version. It’s messaging remote work tool that everybody loves. Slack has free version, paid options start from £5.25/mo per user.Also you can make call and video meetings directly from the application.

2. ProofHub -for remote project management

ProofHub is an online project management software that is trusted by hundreds of remote teams to bring everything at one place. Team members can have seamless interactions with fellow teammates and clients. ProofHub comes with a plenty of features such as online proofing, discussions, chat to share feedback and remote project management only at a central place. ProofHub being an all-in-one remote project management software is a must-have for teams that demand a greater level of management proficiency.

3. Asana 

Asana allows your team to create projects, add collaborators, upload files and write comments on various projects and tasks, set up deadlines. This app can be used as a Kanban board or as a schedule, depending on each user. 

We use Asana to keep track of tasks in a number of departments. For easy follow ups, tasks and subtasks can be assigned to different team members with deadlines as granular as time of day. 

4. Zoom – for remote video meetings
Zoom is a popular video communication tool, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing. Our remote team UNL Solutions uses Zoom regularly to talk to both users and potential clients. Moreover video calls on Zoom can be recorded if you need to keep the information from the call for later use. 

5. Loom – for remote screen records

Loom is a productivity tool that records your screen and yourself talking at the same time. This is perfect for teams that are building or designing things together. 

Our team uses Loom to help each other solve bugs in the programming. By using screen recordings, it’s easier to communicate what’s going on.

6.  Dropbox

When you want to share large files, Dropbox is a good solution. Remote workers can easily sync, share and collaborate on documents. This cloud storage system has API that makes it useful for remote collaborators. It allows for sharing big files – powerpoint, photoshop, sketch with anyone.

7. Jira

Jira is a project management tool used for issue tracking, bug tracking, and project management purposes. 

Why is it good to work remotely with Jira:

• Transparency – it gives your team a place to track the progress of their daily tasks, make adjustments to estimates, and see what other team members are up to, eliminating the need to go and ask your colleague directly what’s up to

• It makes easier the communication process: When a project manager assigned tickets to a team member in Jira, that person will be notified through email. As they work on the task, they can add comments and mark their progress

• It is perfect for development and technical support teams to get more work done and faster

• Like Trello, it uses Flexible Kanban boards that give your team full visibility into what’s next so you can continuously deliver maximum output in minimal cycle time

• It gives access to more than a dozen out-of-the-box reports with real-time, actionable insights into how the team is performing sprint over sprint. No need for face to face reporting.

• You can bring information from your favourite version control, build, deployment or feature flagging tool into Jira and get instant visibility into your development pipeline

With all these remote work tools in your pocket, it is likely that remote workers will stay productive and ensure employee happiness. We confidently recommend all the tools in this list as a starter kit for remote teams to hit targets, no matter how far spread out team members might be.