Working remotely saves time and money for the employer and employees. For the employer, teleworkers are often happier and more productive than their colleagues working in the office. Employees can balance work and personal life more easily and save money due to less frequent travel. No matter if you work from home out of necessity or because you’re like 47% of Canadians who work for companies that have adopted a more flexible work culture, here are some tech tools that will make your job easier.

The teamwork

Whether it’s chatting with each other about an upcoming project or holding meetings to keep team members engaged, the tools for fostering teamwork help them stay connected.

Slack: For traditional chat or video conferencing between team members, Slack is a free collaborative platform for small teams that offers plans for larger groups. The free service lets you integrate 10 additional apps such as Google Drive and Office 365. Use chat to chat about customers, workload, and daily tasks between teams, or send private messages to other participants.

Zoom: Zoom is a communication platform allowing employees to hold remote meetings. The free service offers the possibility of gathering 100 participants and allows an unlimited number of meetings to be held for up to 40 minutes. For longer meetings or larger groups, the app offers a choice of monthly memberships.

Achieving business goals and coordinating the responsibilities of team members on a specific project can be difficult with telecommuters. Project management applications keep team members engaged, track progress, and give you a better idea of ​​the level of completion.

Asana: Asana stores dashboards, tracks and manages emails between team members, helps establish team calendars and manage deadlines, as well as visualize the progress of your projects and establish the priority of tasks from start to finish. The basic service trial is free. The company also offers paid memberships for larger groups.

Remote Access

Remote access applications allow you to retrieve information stored on your desktop computer from home. A remote access application can give you more processing power or the ability to run applications that are too heavy to install on a home computer.

TeamViewer: TeamViewer is a remote access application compatible with devices running Windows, OS X, Android, iOS and Linux. This software must be installed on the computer that will receive the data and on the one to which the data is to be accessed. However, it does support screen sharing, which is ideal for a telecommuter who needs technical help from the help desk.

Staying connected with telecommuters is essential to the success of any business. Business applications help you stay productive and connected on the priorities of your business and your colleagues.