7 Essential Apps To Manage Virtual Teams Effectively

Virtual teams, flexible work hours, work from home, and different time-zones aren’t only vanity perks reserved for high paid executives. These practices are fast becoming the norm; especially in the tech world.

Modern businesses have come to understand the importance of productivity and value over micromanagement and control. All they want from their employees now is to deliver the best solutions possible according to their employee’s abilities and remove the stress of long commutes and morning traffic jams.

Whether you are a small or medium-sized enterprise or just thinking about to jump-start an app, our suggested apps will certainly assist you to streamline your processes and manage your virtual teams effectively.

#1 Trello

Plan, Act, Check!

Trello helps manage your projects, relative tasks, and teams effectively. Their software has a simple but excellent user interface which allows project managers to easily create projects and manage their workflows effectively.

Within Trello, most of the functionality is simple drag & drop and the intuitive design allows for project managers to become productive quickly. Trello helps users to create projects, tasks, assign users, set up deadlines, checklists, attachments from various sources (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.). The best part is that all these features are self-explanatory and even non-tech savvy people can easily perform these tasks.

#2 Slack

Communication is the key.

Slack has quickly become a tech powerhouse and communication hub for virtual teams. Whether you are managing internal communication, customer services, sales, or support — Slack covers all of your bases. All you have to do is to simply create your team, set up the desired channels, and invite your team members to a group chat or one-on-one communication.

In addition to the default chat behavior, Slack also allows users to integrate a wide range of applications (Github, bitbucket, Trello, Google Drive, Dropbox etc.). With Slack, users can manage most of their communication solutions under one roof.

#3 Hubstaff

Convert time into productivity.

Hubstaff is a smart app to track and monitor your virtual team’s time and assist you in gauging resource productivity. The application not only tracks your team’s time but also monitors their keyboard and mouse activity. In addition to continuous monitoring it provides up to the minute screenshots of their desktop.

Depending on the pricing plan selected, managers can manage weekly budgets, idle time control, payroll, attendance scheduling and other applications integration. Hubstaff works well on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.

If you want to check out Hubstaff in more detail, TimeDoctor has published a detailed review on its key features.

#4 Github

Development, Collaboration, and Deployment.

Github is the modern day version of sourceforge. Its intuitive interface and open-source model allows you to collaborate and review your team’s work on a daily basis. Source control solutions such as Github have garnered massive adoption in recent times and rightfully so. Github’s flexibility can assist you to manage your software development code, branches, features, documentation, and can provide the hooks needed to create deployment pipelines.

For open-source development projects, Github can also assist you to develop an engaging community around your open-source source code. Githubs solutions provide the ability for users to report issues in codebase, request new features, implement documentation, and even provide support services for your product.

#5 GoToMeeting

Meet the team virtually.

GoToMeting is intelligent and nimble when it comes to video conferencing, screen sharing and meeting with your virtual team. We all know meetings can be boring and often consume a significant portion of your day. However with GoToMeeting the show runs smoothly and the solution allows you to harness your team’s skills by providing a gathering point for communication. The app offers different subscription plans (each reasonably priced) and you can select the most effective one for your team accordingly.

#6 Dropbox

File sharing made easy.

Dropbox allows you to share files, documents, images and video with your team easily. Dropbox allows you to create project folders and sub folders as desired and also allows your specific team members to access those folders from their own accounts.

This hybrid file sharing solution works best if you integrate it with Slack (see above), which will allow your team to manage links on a desired channel and revert back to the file location as needed.

In case you’re not into Dropbox you can compare various cloud solutions with Cloudwards. They provide an interactive chart that lets you find the best fit solution for your needs – tried & tested!

#7 Heroku

Cloud based Continuous deployment — to save you time and money.

Heroku is a cloud-based platform designed to aid you when it comes time to deploy your apps. Heroku enables your team to present their work to all stakeholders on a frequent basis and receive real time feedback from stakeholders. This, in turn, ultimately saves time and costs in reworking incorrect implementations. Managing a heroku server is easy, follow their documentation which will assist you to build and deploy your project easily.

Which other app is essential to manage virtual teams? Let us know in the comments below!

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