7 Ways Your Remote Team Can Boost Productivity With Zoho One
- Erica Tamparong
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
After the COVID-19 pandemic, more businesses and employees shifted to working remotely. At first, it was the only solution to keep companies open until the pandemic was resolved. However, as the years went by, remote work continued amid the contained spread of the virus.
Some employees found the benefits of working remotely, such as achieving a work-life balance with a more flexible schedule, making it easier to balance personal and professional lives. Others saw it as a cost-saving opportunity since working from home reduces commuting costs and food expenses. Remote workers also claim that working in the comfort of their homes leads to higher productivity due to fewer office distractions and a personalised workspace.
While remote work offers many positive aspects, it also comes with its own set of challenges.
In this article, we will explore the following topics:
What are the common problems of working remotely?
1. Communication Barriers
Many people find communication in a face-to-face work environment challenging, and remote work only adds to this difficulty, making it harder for individuals to convey ideas, emotions, and nuances. Misunderstandings are also more likely to occur in this setting, as in-person communication is absent, and messages are primarily exchanged through emails and messaging applications. Unfortunately, these misunderstandings contribute to the growing fear of seeking help.
Furthermore, without real-time interaction, individuals face issues such as slow response times, unresolved questions, and limited communication exchanges, leading to a lack of engagement and clarity.
2. Collaboration Challenges
Without effective communication within an organisation, collaboration suffers, leading to missed deadlines and a lack of cohesion among team members. One cause of this challenge is working from different locations and time zones, which makes it difficult to collaborate and coordinate tasks.
There are collaborative tools designed to address this issue. However, if collaboration is affected, the team’s productivity will most likely decrease, impacting the company itself. Issues won’t be addressed quickly, and the necessary information will be delayed, causing the team to experience interrupted progress.
3. Project Management and Productivity Monitoring
Managing tasks, deadlines, and projects across dispersed teams is one of the main concerns that top management frequently raises. They feel that they can no longer effectively monitor the work of their employees. If there are missed deadlines, it becomes difficult to track the cause of the delay.
In the absence of direct supervision, tracking the productivity and performance of remote employees is challenging. Beyond monitoring performance, management also struggles to recognise employees' achievements and progress, which often leads to concerns about workers feeling less visible to the company.
4. Data Security and Privacy Concerns
Compared to working in a face-to-face environment, companies face increased risks related to protecting sensitive information and ensuring that personal data remains private. This becomes a critical concern, especially when dealing with hundreds of clients and large amounts of information.
We cannot ignore the fact that remote workers often connect to public networks, including unsecured Wi-Fi. While there is nothing illegal about doing this, it increases the risk of data interception by hackers, making the sensitive data your organisation holds more vulnerable to being compromised in the event of a data breach.
5. Financial Management
One of the problems that organisations face when operating remote businesses is managing finances. This includes expense tracking, timely sending of invoices, and financial reporting. Some may argue that this area is easy to manage, especially if employees’ attendance is automatically recorded. However, it becomes a challenge when teams are spread across the globe.
Taxes, currencies, and salary transfer fees must be considered when workers are in different locations. Manually managing this information is a hassle for the organisation, especially if there are hundreds of employees to keep track of.
What is Zoho One?
Zoho One is a comprehensive suite of business applications designed to help organisations manage and streamline operations. The goal of this operating system is broken down into three significant areas: simplify data management, enhance decision-making, and achieve new levels of productivity. Zoho One offers more than 60+ powerful cloud-based applications that cover a wide range of business functions, such as sales, marketing, customer relationship management, finance, human resources, project management, and many more. With its wide array of software tools, Zoho One not only helps businesses operate but also improves operational efficiency. This ensures that teams in one organisation stay connected and data remains synchronised regardless of location.
What are the 7 ways your remote team can boost productivity with Zoho One?
1. Seamless Communication with Zoho Cliq, Zoho Meeting & Zoho Connect
If your organisation's concern is keeping your remote team intact at all times, you can enhance communication by leveraging the full power of Zoho's communication tools. This includes Zoho Cliq, Zoho Meeting, and Zoho Connect.
Zoho Cliq is a team messaging platform that enables real-time communication within organisations. It offers organised channels for various purposes, including project discussions, casual conversations, and one for making critical announcements. This software helps streamline communication, ensuring all team members stay informed and aligned on tasks and updates. Meanwhile, remote teams can conduct high-quality video conferences with Zoho Meeting, facilitating client presentations and brainstorming sessions. Holding activities with online face-to-face interaction for team meetings is essential, as it helps maintain personal connections, even when team members are physically distant. Additionally, Zoho Connect can be used for sharing updates, knowledge, and resources, while also enabling team members to interact through posts, polls, and discussions.
2. Document Collaboration with Zoho WorkDrive
Zoho WorkDrive is an online file management solution for teams that work together. This software offers cloud-based file storage, allowing your remote team to securely store, access, and collaborate on documents from anywhere, at any time. With its real-time collaboration features, team members can edit documents simultaneously, eliminating the need for constant email exchanges just to update one another on the latest version.
If you are concerned about its accessibility and security features, Zoho WorkDrive also provides access controls, enabling teams to assign permissions and determine who can view, edit, or share specific documents. Using this software will empower your team to work more efficiently, collaborate seamlessly, and access critical business files securely from any location.
3. Efficient Task Management with Zoho Projects
If you are looking for a comprehensive project management tool to keep remote teams organised and on track, regardless of their location, Zoho Projects is built for that purpose. With features like task management, team members can easily create, assign, and prioritise tasks to ensure everyone knows their responsibilities and deadlines.
Visual task boards, along with lists and categories, are also available through this software. These features help set milestones, track progress, and define deadlines, which eliminates confusion and ensures work flows smoothly. Moreover, Zoho Projects integrates time-tracking tools that allow team members to log hours spent on tasks, helping monitor productivity and manage resources.
4. Automate Workflows with Zoho Flow
Zoho Flow is an automation tool that streamlines workflows by automating repetitive tasks and integrating applications, saving your organisation time and reducing manual effort. With this software, you can create custom workflows that connect applications, whether from Zoho or third-party providers, allowing data to transfer between systems without the need for manual input.
Two of Zoho Flow’s key promises are to eliminate data silos and boost productivity within your team. Whether it's creating tasks in Zoho Projects from emails, adding leads to Zoho CRM from forms, or syncing customer data between platforms, this software helps your system run efficiently through its customisable triggers and actions. If you're wondering whether this is beneficial for your remote team, the answer is yes. By automating actions like data entry and follow-up reminders for customers, your teams will have more time to focus on strategic tasks.
5. Streamline Customer Relationships with Zoho CRM
If you're aiming to streamline customer relationships, track leads, and automate sales processes, Zoho One offers you Zoho CRM. This cloud-based platform enables real-time access to customer data, ensuring everyone on your remote team stays aligned.
With the tools available in Zoho CRM, you can gain a 360-degree view of each client's history and preferences, which is vital for providing personalised services that strengthen loyalty. Additionally, by centralising customer data and automating processes, Zoho CRM boosts sales efficiency, improves communication within your team, and accelerates deal closures. Furthermore, with powerful analytics and reporting tools, this software allows your team to monitor key performance indicators in real-time and make data-driven decisions.
6. Billing with Zoho Books
Zoho Books is a comprehensive accounting solution designed to help your remote team automate financial processes, including tasks such as billing, invoicing, and expense tracking. With its user-friendly interface, this software eliminates the need for in-depth accounting knowledge, allowing your team to easily manage accounts, generate reports, and ensure compliance.
Moreover, Zoho Books excels not only in financial reporting, enabling you to track your company’s profit and loss in real-time, but also in tracking the billable hours worked by your employees and contractors. Also, since one of its features is to ensure compliance, you may use this software to set up taxes for different regions and generate detailed tax reports.
7. Monitor Team Performance with Zoho Analytics
With Zoho Analytics, you can now transform data into insights in just minutes. This software is an AI-powered, self-service business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform that provides deep insights into key performance metrics across remote teams. By collecting data from various sources, such as Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects, it can create a comprehensive view of operations, allowing top management to track productivity, progress, and financial health.
Through the data that Zoho Analytics illustrates, it helps identify bottlenecks, optimize workflows, and ensure remote teams are meeting deadlines, even when working from different locations or time zones. With its advanced analytics features, this software allows your organization to perform tasks such as trend analysis, forecasting, and predictive modeling, enabling you to make data-driven decisions and plan for future performance.
Final Thoughts
One of the greatest benefits you can provide is the opportunity to offer your teams a remote work environment. This not only creates a work-life balance culture for your employees but also enables your organisation to tap into a vast global talent pool, allowing you to recruit the best talent from anywhere in the world.
By integrating tools like Zoho One, your organisation can achieve so much more. Start with simple steps and use the seven strategies to boost your remote team’s productivity. Implementing these steps can help unlock the full potential of your remote teams, leading to improved performance and business growth.
If you are looking for a way to implement Zoho One software tools effectively, FWRD is here to help you leverage the full potential of these solutions. Our team specialises in seamlessly integrating Zoho into your business operations, ensuring you can optimise productivity, enhance collaboration, and streamline workflows across your organisation.
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