Today’s workers are demanding flexibility and a work-life balance from their employers. To meet these demands, many employers allow their employees to work remotely instead of requiring them to come into an office everyday. In fact, it was reported in 2016 that 43% of employees in the U.S. worked from home, and this number is expected to grow in the years ahead.
Both employers and employees benefit from remote work. Allowing employees to work remotely saves employers money and increases employee satisfaction. Research has shown that remote workers take fewer sick and vacation days, meaning they log more hours than office workers.
However, remote work also presents a few challenges to employers and employees, mainly that it is challenging for remote workers to collaborate and communicate when they are not in the same place. Fortunately, this problem can easily be solved with the right project management app.
What Are Project Management Apps?
Project management apps/platforms are used to help teams organize project information, documents, tasks, etc in a central location. Everyone who is on the team can then track the project’s progress, post updates and questions, and access the information they need to complete their portion of the project. These apps are useful in many different work environments, but they are especially beneficial to remote teams.
The Benefits of Using Project Management Platform
Managers may worry that remote employees won’t be as productive when working from home. This is a reasonable assumption, given a home doesn’t offer the same structure and distraction-free environment of an office.
A good project management system, however, allows managers to track their employees’ progress. It should have auditing capabilities allowing managers to track activity and tasks, and generate reports based on individual users’ activity. Managers can identify team members who are functioning well in the remote environment, and those who aren’t pulling their weight.
Communication is another challenge that remote teams can overcome with the help of a project management platform. Remote workers could be located in different time zones, or working on their own schedules. Team messaging apps can help teams communicate during scheduled work hours in real-time, but conversations and actions can easily got lost in long chat threads.
A comprehensive platform will allow you to keep your entire team on the same page. Within a project, you can update your employees with any new developments, attach new files, and keep a thorough record of activity so that anyone looking in on a project can instantly know it’s status.
Project management platforms can also help remote teams avoid the frustration of being unable to connect to the company’s network from afar. If there are connection issues, remote workers will not have access to the files they need to complete their work. With a project management app hosted on a cloud server, however, files related to a project can be uploaded into the app, so remote workers do not need to access a specific network to gain access to them. Instead, they simply need to log into the app and locate the files they need.
It’s not hard to see why so many remote teams rely on project management tools to coordinate with one another and complete tasks. Now the question is—which project management tool is right for your team?
The Gryffin Project Management Tool
There are countless project management apps, but none that can benefit your company quite like Gryffin. Gryffin is one of the few all-in-one project management apps that is completely customizable, so it can be adjusted to fit the needs of your team. Create custom templates, projects, and workflows to help automate tasks and make every project run seamlessly!
All of the tasks within a project can connect with one another within the system so project managers can stay organized. There is also an interactive dashboard that gives managers a snapshot of the progress on each active project.
All of your team’s communication can take place within Gryffin. Plus, each team member receives an email notification whenever they are mentioned in a comment, so they will know .
The old expression, “Team work makes the dream work” has never been truer, but working as a team is more challenging when workers are remote. By using Gryffin, managers can increase productivity, improve communication, and effectively lead their remote teams!