With the COVID-19 pandemic necessitating social distancing and work from home (WFH), the corporate world shifted beyond recognition. The paradigms of the business went under transition from office board-rooms to the use of digital tools for workflow automation. From presentations to project management, team collaboration to marketing, every industry switched to remote-working. A plethora of tools with Software as a Service (SaaS) assisted in adopting technology for remote work. The coronavirus may have altered work temporarily, but it has forced businesses to rethink their offerings and strategies.
A multitude of smart automation tools for webinars, collaborative communication, PowerPoint presentations and file management are attainable online for a smooth working experience from home. A webinar is best supported with a stellar PowerPoint presentation crafted with professional presentation templates rendering it unique and eye-catching. A study about remote work shows that persuasive visual assets are helping remote workers in their presentations. Organizations optimized workflow and augmented strategies are becoming fundamental to brand success. The technological swing for WFH has accelerated workforce planning, boosted profitability and maintained the functioning of the enterprises.
Here is a list of 10 workflow automation tools adopted by businesses for making remote working seamlessly:
Project Management Tools
Monday.com
An efficient project management tool allows the firms to unify the tasks, consolidate the teams, information and applications into one central platform. Monday.com is a team management software that allows a team to add members rapidly, assign tasks, customize workflow, and track the progress of their work to completion.
Imbibed with features of messaging, Calendar sync, due date reminders, time tracking, Graphs & Insights, and Forms, this tool provides multiple options to plan projects to its users. Form dashboards, prioritize tasks, set project timelines, milestones, collaborate and manage your team’s entire workload all in one place.
Trello
With remote working, it is imperative for management and teams to coordinate without any hassle and finish tasks on time. Trello is another web-based online project management software that allows you to create dashboards that highlight large projects or categories and tasks related to them.
With Trello, utilize its three-tier system with dashboards, cards and lists. Receive notifications and triggers for uncompleted tasks. Organize your daily work, track your time of tasks, collaborate in real-time, build timeline calendars, streamline work requests, proactively monitor progress to stakeholders.
Presentation Design Tools
SlideModel
To anchor an intuitive and captivating webinar, your PowerPoint presentation ought to be top-notch and awe-inspiring with a schematic content display. SlideModel.com hosts 30,000+ diverse professionally crafted slide templates which are 100% editable suited to every business niche.
Corporate-ready templates, avant-garde presentation designs with superior-quality graphics, and visual elegance from charts, maps, and diagrams can integrate your slide deck with a visual kick. Marketing Templates, Business, Strategy Templates, SWOT, Business Metrics, and Timeline Decks are just the tip of template iceberg available on this site.
Pitcherific
Worried about presenting your business proposal in lockdown? Pitch your business presentations in creatively with Pitcherific. This tool offers a wide range of professionally pre-designed intuitive templates, and publications like business cards, resumes, and newsletters.
Impress your clients with engaging and enticing slide decks by building your dream presentations with this tool. With all the features fully customizable, edit the text and graphics corresponding to your topic. Utilize the time clock trait of this tool to track your slide’s explanation while delivering to clients.
Communication and Collaboration Tools
Nextiva
With all your colleagues in different cities and countries, keep your business operational even in this pandemic with this remarkable software. Nextiva consolidates company communications into one platform – enabling businesses to make VoIP-based internet calls, video/audio conferencing, SMS, Google faxing, and team collaboration.
Nextiva helped businesses prioritize simplicity, reliability, and ease of use. Work from anywhere, connect with anyone with this tool. It caters to one-to-one, easy-to-join meetings with your clients online. The demand for communication tools for virtual conferences and telecommunications has been made easy with Nextiva.
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is a user-friendly web-conferencing tool to connect with your co-workers and clients in WFH. Schedule meetings or deliver a webinar to thousands of participants with this software. Join one-time quick meetings without any need for the download, record calls, share screen, turn conference spaces into collaboration centers with it.
All calls in this tool are secure with its advanced security features. Monitor your audio, assess performance metrics for users, sync your devices to communicate with your employees productively. Host online meetings with up to 250 people at once, form personal meeting rooms, compile slides from presentations and convert them into shareable PDFs with this software.
Time Tracking Tool
Harvest
Our home environment often ends up distracting us while remote working. With Harvest time tracking software, teams can track time-related to task completion assigned by clients. It has an interactive interface incorporated with interactive timesheets, record hours dedicated to a project, time management of employees for productive feedback.
Send invoice reminders and receipts to your stakeholders, set automatic reminders to submit tasks, track pending approvals, report budgets, bills, costs and expenses into invoices. Devoted contractor reports review your contractor’s time, total costs, and export a detailed report. Additionally, convert your documents into Excel, PDF and CSV documents within no time with Harvest.
Time Doctor
Work-life balance is a requisite while working from home to have a healthy social and work life. Time Doctor is another time tracking application for teams. Keep an eye on scheduled breaks, take screenshots of your employee’s monitors at a specified time, and manage your time easily with this application.
Receive daily and weekly reports, data on client breakdowns, time usage stats, get pop-up alerts with this software. Integrated with Trello, Asana, Basecamp, Slack, Todoist and other work management tools, Time Doctor offers you the perfect solution to boost your productivity. Keep track of every employee and make them accountable for their working hours.
Asset Management Tools
DropBox
As businesses started going remote, smart ones realized that it’s paramount to store data on the cloud. Rather than storing critical files and documents here and there and then sharing manually takes a toll on workplace productivity. Businesses today have started sharing files via DropBox. The platform enables seamless storage and sharing of documents. With one click, managers can share files with team members, assign accessibility roles and limit permissions to share, alter and delete.
DropBox is easy to access. Your business teams sitting two time zones away can access the data through desktop, laptops, smartphones and tablets. Moreover, since it’s a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, users are no longer required to go through the hassle of downloading the software. Businesses around the world are enjoying mobility, security, data integrity and collaboration enabled by DropBox.
Google Drive
Google Drive is another popular and free service for data sharing. The platform offers far greater flexibility and ensures higher collaboration since it’s free. Small businesses can leverage up to 15 GB of express storage without any charge with Google Drive. Moreover, since Google servers are running on across the world, your data is always up and you can access the same without any downtime.
Google Drive has maintained a personal computer like a file system. You can organize, share, edit files in Google services such as Docs, Sheets, etc. Google Drive also offers a ton of addons for enterprise-level business use.