7 tools that make sure employees are productive while working at home.

Are your employees working from home? How are you managing their productivity?

Without constantly checking up on them, it’s a lot easier to manage productivity than you think. With the latest project and task management tools, you can easily set up tasks, track and manage productivity.

We set up a poll at Linktech Australia, and found the best tools that will complement the Microsoft suite of products. We chose these tools because we have experience with them; they are intuitive and, best of all, they integrate with Microsoft Teams.

Below is our list of tools which will make sure your employees stay on track:

1. monday.com – Project Management Made Easy

Project management that is designed to give you a flexible and transparent way to organise your work. With a highly visual scheduling interface and customizable workflows, Monday.com adapts to the unique way members of your team approach their projects.

Monday.com is a comprehensive productivity suite that includes all the features needed to divide up the work of your team, monitor project progress, and ensure individual tasks are completed to schedule.

2. Wrike – Manage your projects from start to finish

Extremely easy to use project management software. The platform is fairly intuitive and allows you to start tracking collaborative projects and milestones very quickly.

Wrike is a useful tool for project managers, and team leads to collect and organise project requirements, create project plans, and visualise schedules on the Gantt chart. As work progresses, project plans can be adjusted easily, and all involved teams will get notifications about work changes.

3. Asana – Project and work management for teams of all sizes

Manage and organise tasks and projects, communicate and collaborate with Asana. It’s helpful for teams that handle multiple projects at one time, and suits companies of any size.

Features include task management, reporting, automatic notifications, a customer portal, collaboration tools, dashboards, a mobile application, document management and task assigning.

Asana excels at task management, with a highly intuitive and flexible interface that makes it easy to work within teams of any size. The platform’s suite of tools includes task assignment, workload management, and plenty of app integrations.

4. Microsoft Planner – Work management and organisation for teams

Collaboration, project management, and task planning for teams that’s fully integrated into the Office 365 ecosystem. Users can create plans, add tasks to each plan, assign team members to tasks, and track individual and team progress for every plan. The drag-and-drop interface allows users to categorise tasks, update statuses, and assign tasks smoothly.

The Planner interface is a lightweight and powerful Kanban style task management or light project management board. The recent addition of the timeline view of the cards helps to manage the tasks even better.

5. Zoho Projects – Project Management, Collaboration and Bug Tracking

A highly capable project management software with plenty of tools for team communication, project timekeeping, and bug tracking.

Real-time tracking of your team’s productivity is also easy, giving you reliable information on how much time is being spent on a specific task. You will know how much paid hours your team has rendered and whether you are operating within your timeline.

Zoho Projects is particularly attractive for small teams and start-ups since it offers a free plan for up to five users and very inexpensive paid plans.

6. Trello – Visual collaboration tool for shared project perspectives

An easy to use, flexible and fun project management tool. Trello prides its self as a visual project management and collaboration tool that allows individuals and groups to work with any team.

Organise tasks through a system of boards, lists, and cards, and use it for work, a side project, or the family’s vacation. The highly visual system provides information at a glance, so teams can easily create tasks, assign them, prioritise and track progress.

7. Microsoft OneNote – Collaboration and file management

Create simple or complex notes from scratch, organise them into searchable, browsable notebooks, and sync them among a variety of platforms, including Windows PCs, Macs, iPods and iPhones, Android devices and the web.

OneNote is perfect for taking quick notes or smaller ‘documents’ that you will reference regularly. I think that it is less well suited for full document management. OneNote isn’t Microsoft Word or Excel. If you keep this in mind, OneNote is a great tool to collaborate with.