A number of technological advancements have led to a surge in the demand for remote workers. These workers usually come at a relatively lower cost than local workers.
As the need to hire offshore development teams rises in companies, more tools that are useful and necessary for remote workers are being developed. We can certainly vouch for this here at Cloud Employee. As our offshore developers in the Philippines are well versed in the vital remote working tools, we’ve noticed the improved efficiency in our clients’ software development projects.
No doubt, for remote workers to achieve maximum success with projects they’ve been assigned, they need to arm themselves with essential digital tools that will fast-track productivity and ensure they reach their goals in a timely manner.
Top 10 Remote Working Tools For Developers
Businesses everywhere have had to adapt to changing times. Recent happenings across the globe have made everyone glaringly aware that work needs to happen irrespective of location. For remote work to have any semblance to in-office work, some digital tools must be introduced into the mix.
Here are the top 10 tools in the categories of communication, programming, tasks, notes, finance, security, miscellaneous, designing, and time tracking;
Best Communication Tools
This is a business communication platform with features that include direct messaging, file sharing, and video chat rooms. Slack allows you to centralize all workload or tasks by integrating other digital tools.
It allows users to create separate channels for different company functions to avoid cluster. Furthermore, it provides a journal feature that allows users to take notes while in a chat room, or even make notes on a recent project they have been tasked with. This tool is referred to as the “email replacement”.
This platform is a video conferencing tool utilized by both companies and individuals for smooth remote meetings. It gained prominence when COVID-19 forced businesses to operate from home. Zoom offers a wide range of features which includes but is not limited to virtual background in the chat room, a waiting room for meetings, calendar integration and face touch up, to look more professional. The zoom platform has a simple interface that is easy to set up, use and manage.
Best Project Management Tools
Here you'll find a cloud based collaborative tool which is designed to assist individuals, teams, companies with project management and organization. The Trello board is categorized with lists that can be assigned individual cards. The card gives room to include details of the project, persons assigned to it and any discussion to be included. It reduces cluster around project assignments with simple features to organize and track tasks. The ability to customize your lists ensures access to important metrics and that automatic alerts are sent to each user when changes are made.
Best Tools for Notes
This is a collaborative note taking tool that enables its user to share notes and manage projects with other people. It functions as an archive for all your projects, documents and tasks. It equally allows users to add a list, comment, make detailed notes about assigned tasks, videos, sounds and code snippets. It also offers an individual view of the user’s to-do list. Notion multitasks as a task tool.
Best Tools for Programming
GitHub is the go to software development platform for all software developers. Its features allow code reviews, making changes to development processes and automated workflow. It equally allows integration with tools like Slack among others. Collaboration, bug tracking, project and team management and social coding are some features that this tool offers.
Best Tools for Designing
Photoshop
This design tool was birthed by Adobe and comes with features for creating images as well as raster graphics. It's undoubtedly the answer to all your image editing needs. The platform allows users to save work in different formats and offers features including layers’ palette, selection tools, pen tool, raster based graphic design, smart objects and creative cloud.
Best Tools for Security
This one happens to be a virtual private network that ensures your online presence is private and offers anonymity so your online actions are virtually untraceable. It further allows secure access to apps and webpages, among others. Here, you'll find features like next generation encryption, simultaneous encryption, automatic kill switch and a DNS leak protection among others.
Best Tools for Finance
This software tool is responsible for financial administration which, altogether makes running a business fairly stress- free. One of the things it does is to send invoices out and generate automatic follow-up emails. It further generates financial reports which give you a clear view of where your business is after payments are sent out. To top it all off, it sends personalized thank you emails, requests for deposits and applies discounts to invoices. Accountants come at a very high cost, but freshBooks can be your digital accountant at a flexible price.
Best Tools for Time Tracking
RescueTime is a time management software tool that captures time spent on meetings, documents, websites and phone calls. It generates weekly summaries of activity to users, ranks your days as productive and unproductive, ranks your time spent on apps and web pages as either distracting or productive and blocks access to distracting websites.
Best Tools for Storage
Google Drive should be a household name by now. It’s a cloud storage tool for all your documents, images, files, music, presentations, and screenshots. It enables you to save g-mail attachments, scan documents, work offline, work smarter with google sheets, slides, documents, and Google forms. It is quite handy if you want to send large files via g-mail, and it even comes with a built-in search engine. You can open and edit documents on google drive at any time.
Companies are depending largely on hiring offshore teams to cut costs and also increase productivity. Nevertheless, it reached its peak when Coronavirus took the world by surprise. Yet, even as COVID seems to dwindle, remote working is still in demand and from the looks of things, it is here to stay.
It is up to you, an individual, and as a remote worker, to equip yourself with digital tools that will increase your productivity while ensuring you meet deadlines with little to no pressure. Get acquainted with the tools listed above and search for more digital tools because they are your way forward as a remote worker.
We hope you found this article useful. Here at Cloud Employee, we assist companies looking to hire dedicated offshore developers in the Philippines, who are skilled across many technologies. Talk to us, learn more how Cloud Employee works, or see our Developer Pricing Guide.
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