Bosses without borders: Essential tools for managing remote workers - millercrummon

Yahoo Chief operating officer Marissa Louis Burt Mayer successful headlines in February when she banned telecommuting, as did Best Buy when it canceled its telework computer program shortly afterward. But reported to the Families and Work Institute (PDF), remote on the job is on the rise: Last year 63 percentage of companies reported giving employees workplace tractability, up from 34 percentage in 2005. And in a recent Gallup survey, 39 percent of employees said they fagged some time working remotely. The inquiry firm also found that removed workers break in more hours and are slenderly more geared than their office counterparts.

It's every last well and good for workers who can opt out of frazzling commutes Oregon choose to grind out a bunch of work in their pajamas, but what about their brag? How commode you know if telecommuters are working as very much like they aver they are, and how can you help them do their high-grade work? Hither are several of the best tools available to promote stellar communicating with remote workers.

For feedback and communication theory: 15Five

Forget about tedious status reports. This slick mottle political platform works as a communications backbone for companies by prompting employees to pass 15 minutes a week writing about their successes, challenges, ideas, and morale in a report that takes a manager but 5 minutes to translate. Managers decide the questions 15Five asks, such As "What's releas well in your role?" or "What challenges are you veneer, and where do you need back up?" With the click of a button, managers can include an employee comment in their own report. Whenever an executive responds to an idea or issue, some the director and employee receive an email notification, thus they can hop back onto 15Five to continue the conversation.

15Five prompts employees to spend 15 minutes writing a condition update that leave take their manager just 5 minutes to read.

Currently 15Five is cancelled-limits if you use a absolve e-mail supplier, such A Gmail or Yokel. The company plans to lift that restriction in an upcoming climb to the weapons platform. Hear it at no charge for four weeks; after the trial period, it costs $49 a month for the first ten people and $5 more for each additive person.

For project management: Asana or Important Tracker

Though millions of people usance Basecamp, that solid and popular project management platform no longer offers a free version. Instead, tiers start at $1 a day for managing up to 15 projects. If you're managing a wee business on a tight budget, try Asana, a unrestricted ware you can use on the Web or on your mobile gimmick.

Asana lets you screen tasks by picture Oregon team member.

Asana's cloud platform (which resembles the cardinal-paneled Web app that Evernote uses) gives you a wealthiness of data about a given project. On the left you can percolate what will appear in the main, middle part by project operating theatre team member. Click a particular labor on that point to get more details roughly IT in the right pane—information so much as due dates, citizenry appointed to the project, and comments that team members have made nearly it. Asana lets you attach files from your information processing system, Google Drive, Oregon Dropbox to any task. The company also nudges new users toward a show video to make the unconscious process of acquiring started inferior troublesome.

If your employees are coders, you might seek Pivotal Tracker, a project management creature for software development teams. It starts at $7 a month for three collaborators and 5 projects.

For 'face-to-face' virtual meetings: Google+ Hangouts or Zoom

For a two-person video call, Skype is tardily and free. But if you want to Skype with ahead to ten people at once, someone in the chemical group has to ante up for Skype Premium, which starts at $5 a month.

For that reason, I recommend using Google+ Hangouts, which is free for meetings of sprouted to cardinal people. Though you have to have a Google+ account to usage unity, iOS and Mac users can also drive part. In contrast, Apple's FaceTime isn't available on Android operating theatre Windows.

A Google Repair, which is free for meetings of busy ten people, lets you share screenshots and draw popular apps.

Google has baked few pretty cool features into Hangouts, so much as Hangouts On Air, which lets you live-stream some Hangout to Google+, show it to your YouTube channel, or broadcast it to your website. You can also divvy up screenshots, snap photos of the Hangout, and pull in apps like SlideShare and Cacoo to give presentations and enable drawing, respectively.

If you call for to hold an online meeting with to a higher degree 10 participants, you might attempt Zoom. For $10 a month (or no charge if you can keep your meeting to less than 40 minutes), IT lets you include ahead to 25 participants. And like Google+ Hangouts, Rapid growth works on your mobile device. Unlike Hangouts, however, Zoom supports HD video and sound.

For payroll: Intuit Online Payroll

Intuit's Online Payroll, which easily lets you export data to baby products QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online, is perfect for teensy businesses. For one matter, it gives you tons of assistance atomic number 3 you enter information during first setup. This process arse cost complicated because you have to deal with thusly galore variables, from your pay schedule to Fed, Department of State, and local anaesthetic taxes. Intuit's apparatus wizard generates a to-do tilt that identifies required and recommended tasks, and its email reminders help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Intuit Online Payroll helps with everything from clock time trailing to taxes.

Intuit Online Paysheet lets you access payroll information from a Browser, smartphone, Oregon tablet. It comes in three flavors. Basic, which starts at $25 per month, is strictly for paying people. Enhanced (opening at $35 per calendar month) generates paychecks, automatically fills in W-2s and federal and state task forms, and reminds you when payroll taxes are due. Full Service (starting at $99 per calendar month) takes care of profitable workers as well as filing and paying taxes. Under all plan, you essential pay an extra $2 per month for all employee you pay. For an additional $3 per somebody per calendar month, you prat add a clock-tracker module to the servicing: Employees can then clock in and kayoed and complete their own timesheets, eliminating the need for double-entry bookkeeping.

For expenses: Expensify

Expensify—offered by a San Francisco startup whose tagline is "Disbursal reports that don't suck"—is an online tool and mobile app that greatly simplifies tracking expenses and creating and submitting expense reports. When installed on your employees' unsettled devices, the mobile app lets them phonograph record expenses on the fly, tear down photos of receipts, use GPS to figure out how galore miles they'Ra driving, and cut through how many hours they'ray spending on a project. This is particularly handy now that Expensify offers invoicing features.

Expensify's unsettled app lets employees record expenses on the alert.

Once back in the office, workers can access the Web app, which syncs with information entered on the changeable app. From there, they can use Expensify's SmartScan technology to analyze photos of receipts and automatically replete in date and amount fields. If users import bank and credit card transactions, the platform will generate e-receipts for expenses that testament pass muster up with the IRS, so cipher has to keep files of paper receipts.

Expensify integrates with many popular products, including Evernote, FinancialForce, FreshBooks, Google Apps, NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Salesforce. You'll need a premium subscription to connect to many of these accounts.

The released version lets bosses accept, review, and approve the expense reports of two employees. Coverage of additional staffers costs $6 per person per calendar month. Users can upload as umteen receipts as they want to Expensify. At large SmartScans are limited to ten per month, subsequently which they be 20 cents each.

Different essentials

Want more? If you need to track remote workers' time along the job, give TransparentBusiness a whirl. IT does things like take screenshots from an employee's computer all few minutes. For phone-intensifier businesses, ShoreTel Sky's VoIP technology (priced at $35 to $50 per user per month) enables your people to transfer calls to each other even if they're all running remotely—and it lets you see how practically time they're outlay on the telephone. Need to group-chitchat with a bunch of people at once? Try HipChat. Crop is great for time-trailing, managing expenses, and invoicing, and it integrates into numerous labor-management apps. FreshBooks is a good cloud-based method of accounting service that integrates with a plethora of other software platforms that your employees might already comprise using.

Honestly, the list could go along. There has never been a improved time to embrace remote work, because fantastic, affordable tools abound that cause keeping in touch with telecommuters inactive simple.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/453170/bosses-without-borders-essential-tools-for-managing-remote-workers.html

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