Seamless Synergy: 3 Essential Tools to Drive Project Productivity for Remote Teams

In the post-digital era, remote work is simply a reality of modern business. With employee expectations shifting, particularly since the global pandemic, companies everywhere are striving to embrace the remote work revolution to help them attract and retain the best industry talent. In many cases, however, the benefits of going remote come with some legitimate obstacles, chiefly in relation to productivity. 

While the modern workforce clearly considers remote work options a priority, that doesn't mean that every employee or team is prepared to work efficiently and securely at a distance. With the right technologies at their disposal, however, remote teams can overcome the intrinsic challenges of remote work.

In this blog, we'll highlight three such technologies and discuss how they can help your teams to achieve greater productivity on remote projects.

Visual Collaboration Software for ideation

One of the most common pain points in remote projects is the ideation process. Projects that are in their infancy often require a considerable amount of brainstorming between team members, but this can prove difficult if employees are accustomed to a physical workspace as it can be difficult to express more abstract thoughts succinctly without interacting face to face. Digital collaboration software, however, can help to bridge the gap between the physical workplace and the digital one.

While videoconferencing and instant messaging applications can help teams provide real-time communication for remote teams to work together, visual collaboration platforms can be a game-changer when it comes to ideation and brainstorming. Tools like Miro, for instance, can provide remote teams with a shared digital canvas for sharing ideas and developing project solutions. Using mind maps, illustrations, sticky notes, and a slew of other convenient features, 

By creating a communal space for creative thinking, visual collaboration platforms can help teams to make the abstract tangible, allowing them to get complex projects off the ground, even when working from a distance.

Work Management Platforms for efficiency

Once a project has progressed past the ideation stage, the challenge of task management comes to bear. With team members all working from different locations, diffusion of responsibility can quickly become an issue, and this can hinder project progress significantly. Fortunately, this is where work management platforms like Workast come into their own.

By integrating seamlessly with Slack, Workast enables teams to add project management functionalities to their existing team communication platform. The platform enables teams to create, assign, and update tasks within Slack, allowing for greater visibility and accountability in project management. Additionally, the platform allows teams to manage priority tasks using real-time notifications, helping them to stay on top of critical deadlines.

With a work management platform that integrates into existing communication channels, teams can elevate their management of remote projects by meticulously planning, prioritizing, and executing essential tasks.

Virtual Private Networks for remote access

While facilitating effective collaboration and project management is essential for teams working remotely, so too is ensuring safe remote access. The unfortunate reality is that instances of cybercrime are increasing with each passing year, and with team members working from different locations on different networks, an organization is at greater risk of a breach. To ensure that remote projects actually make it to fruition, it's critical that team employees have a way to access company systems securely from afar. This is what Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, do best. With tools like browsec vpn for chrome, teams can enhance their security measures even further, protecting sensitive data and ensuring peace of mind.

VPNs work by giving users access to a network of remote servers, each of which can act as an intermediary for them when they access the public Internet. This can allow workers to mask their devices' IP addresses to avoid being tracked by hackers. More crucially, VPNs also route user traffic through secure tunnels, applying powerful encryption algorithms to their data so that it cannot be exploited if their traffic is intercepted. This means that by just using a free VPN application, employees can establish secure connections for safe remote access to company resources, even if they happen to working on an unsecured public network.

By ensuring secure remote access, VPNs can help remote teams access essential company resources safely and easily, ensuring high productivity while protecting the longevity of both the project and their organization.

Concluding

Remote work is one of the defining trends of the contemporary digital landscape, and for good reasons, but it comes with some inherent challenges with regard to collaboration, project management, and remote access, all of which can be detrimental to productivity. By putting visual collaboration software, work management platforms, and Virtual Private Networks in the hands of their employees, however, organizations can empower more intuitive, efficient, and secure teamwork to ensure that teams achieve optimal productivity on remote projects.