How To Navigate A Remote Landscape With SaaS Solutions
Publié le 19 December 2022
Adapt to new working arrangements by learning how to navigate a remote landscape with SaaS solutions.
Remote working arrangements are an ever more prominent part of the work landscape. The rise in remote work and the accompanying communications power has led to an explosion in possibilities in terms of work location. Individuals working from home as part of remote teams spread across the globe are commonplace now, much to the benefit of both the individual worker and the organization.
However, alongside opportunities there are, invariably, remote work challenges. The main challenge facing remote workers is how to conquer that distance so that they feel as integral to the team as any office-based worker. That is why learning how to navigate a remote landscape with SaaS solutions can help employers and employees alike.
The Remote Situation
Generally speaking, remote and hybrid working arrangements are very popular. People tend to like the flexibility of working from wherever they choose, rather than being tied to the office. For example, one US 2022 survey found that when employees are given the option of working from home, 87% take it.
Reasons people are keen on the home working option include a desire for a better life-work balance, more time for family and friends and an understandable lack of enthusiasm for the commute into the office.
For team leaders wanting the best people, no matter where in the world they are located, the possibilities afforded by remote working are of particular interest. The past 3 years have seen a true explosion in the number of people working remotely, and those numbers will continue to increase if employee expectations are met.
Image sourced from 99firms.com
With it now representing such a massive proportion of the workforce, remote workers need to be factored into organizational communications thinking. This requires far more resources than just being able to make outgoing calls from their remote workplace.
For instance, if meetings are going to continue, there needs to be a recognition that a colleague based in a different country is unlikely to be present in person at every Monday huddle. So, an effective virtual meeting capability has to be rolled out. This is of course what’s happened over the past few years.
What needs to be understood though is how SaaS solutions and conference management software deliver in this milieu. By virtue of their cloud basis, they are omni-available, in terms of both place and time. This is what makes them ideal for remote working.
So, quite apart from all the SaaS business ideas that are available, there are SaaS remote working enhancements that shouldn’t be overlooked. Chief among these is in the area of collaboration.
1. Collaboration tools
Teams in the remote landscape need to work collaboratively. That’s their MO. It’s here that SaaS solutions can have the most dramatic impact.
Bit
This works by grouping together all the resources that a team might need and making them available wherever the team might spread itself.
The result is company materials like important documentation and knowledge resources are all in one easy-to-use bundle, accessible to all in the team. Media files and anything else that the team accumulates as it works are all stored in the team’s content library, so nothing is misplaced and everybody benefits from everybody else’s progress.
Zoom
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
This is all about the online meeting (plus some file-sharing provision too). Zoom’s growth has been spectacular: every year, there are 3.3 trillion minutes of meetings on the platform. That’s a total meeting time of 6 million years. I’m sure we’ve all felt like we’ve been in one of those.
Slack
Lots of SaaS solutions benefit remote teams by offering distinct channels of communication and quick and easy file sharing along those channels. Slack’s a good example of this kind of tool, and has become very popular in the remote working community (12 million daily users at the time of writing).
Another plus for Slack is the sophisticated and contextual search facility it offers. With the amount of material generated by group activity being potentially overwhelming at times, a powerful search is invaluable.
ProofHub
Screenshot taken from ProofHub.com
A very time-consuming aspect of team working is onboarding. Getting new hires up to speed on both the nature of the work and on how to use the tools can require a great amount of time when done correctly. Making the onboarding process remote without ensuring a lack of communication barriers and it certainly won’t get any quicker.
This is why an intuitive design can really assist with keeping team output fluid and up to speed. And intuitive design is championed by applications such as ProofHub, a project management and collaboration tool.
Being a project management tool, it has the potential to be a great help for managers wanting to stay on top of progress remotely.
2. Website performance
Let’s say your company has created a website designed to make the online shopping experience an absolute joy. It is,
But will users have the same response?
This is where Google Analytics can really help. You can find out how well your site is doing and can break down its performance along lines such as user geographic location and time of visit.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
The high reporting detail level delivers crucial metrics that can inspire action. For instance, if your analytics reports shows that people are abandoning the site mid-activity, do you need to consider SaaS retargeting strategies, in order to recapture their engagement?
You might seek to resurrect engagement via follow-up quizzes or pop-ups, and the information provided through analytics can help you choose the best method.
3. Management Features
Managers need to know which projects have been completed and which are currently in progress. While some remote set-ups mean that by necessity workers are getting more autonomy than they would have enjoyed historically, there still has to be a monitoring and tracking capability in place to ensure company goals are being met.
This is for the good of the task (and hence the organization) and of the employee: in order to properly support the employee the manager has to be apprised of their progress. You can’t always judge how well a person is doing from what they say. If their work habits have dramatically changed, it could be a strong sign that they require additional support and resources to succeed.
Strong managers need a way of keeping an eye on how well their staff are performing in their remote landscape, without resorting to the harmful practice of micromanaging. Thankfully, there are a number of tools out there that provide this function.
Screenshot taken from trello.com
ProofHub and Trello are popular options, which organize projects into very eye-friendly visual boards. Once you’ve got your project boards up and running, you can add tasks and due dates to them, adding descriptions as necessary to enhance communication. Tasks can be assigned to groups or to individuals and progress is readily measurable.
It’s worth mentioning here that Slack has good tools for managers too, including activity logging, an extremely useful facility if there are productivity issues.
4. Encryption
Remote working entails a huge amount of data, some of it highly sensitive, being sent between remote employees. The vulnerabilities here could be enough to keep some professionals up all night worrying, were it not for the vital encryption tools that are available now.
These work not just by encrypting what you want to send, but by encrypting absolutely everything you do on any device. It creates a Virtual Private Network (VPN) around all staff members. Your business activities remain utterly confidential, and you can be confident that the security issue is resolved.
You can use this kind of package in conjunction with other security boosters such as password protected PDF routines.
Say Yes To SaaS
Remote working is such a significant part of the employment landscape that a business can’t afford to ignore solutions that deliver across all zones. We’ve seen how to navigate a remote landscape with SaaS solutions and how SaaS tools can make a difference right across the remote experience. These tools are just waiting to be put to use for the good of employers and employees.
