At a time when more people are moving away from conventional office situations and becoming more remote and nomadic in their working lifestyle, the development of productivity applications designed to keep teams together, even when they are not together, is on the rise. Not only can they organise your work team from any location, they can also help you stay on top of your finances, they can schedule your life and personal time and quite frankly, they can save you and your business a lot of money in the long run.
Firstly, there are organisational applications such as Slack and Trello (shown in image). Trello is fantastic for designating different tasks to your team and for keeping on top of the organisation of large and complex projects with multiple users. It does this using a large board system. Slack is excellent for messaging and contact amongst teams, and you can set up the application so that you can speak one to one with a particular team member, seek to the whole group, or to create smaller subgroups within the team which are specialised on particular tasks. You can also use Slack for sharing documentation and images with ease. You can also use applications such as HubStaff to help track your staff's productivity, and Rescue Time to understand what percentage of time your staff are actually being used on work instead of procrastination.
If you have to collaborate with colleagues and clients all over the world, there are plenty of applications to help you stay on top of the time differences, such as World Time Buddy which will give you a virtual overview of all of the time zones that you need for your business. There are also multiple exchange rate monitoring applications that will help you to understand the price differences in any currency that you are working in.
Trail Wallet and Expensify are two very efficient applications for monitoring your expenditure and helping you to stay on top of your finances, although, depending on the nature and size of your business, they might not be complex enough to deal with every expenditure going through your business. That said, for the every day user, they are very helpful, and will allow you to track where you have overspent, where you could have saved money, and will help you to refine your spending habits so that you are saving more money in the long term.
There are literally applications for everything you can possibly imagine that you will need to accompany your business, and what has been mentioned is really just the tip of the iceburg. The benefit of using them is that you no longer need a traditional office, and that your whole team can work from anywhere where they have access to a reliable WiFi system (there are even applications to help you locate these for when you are working from a new location or from abroad; check out Workhard Anywhere). With collaboration and conferencing applications, there is no need for each other's physical presence, which means, as a business owner, you no longer need to be paying rent on an office. This will also help to boost the moral of your staff as they can schedule a lot of their work around their personal lives and because they are able to work from any location they prefer, such as their own homes or a luxurious resort halfway around the globe. Happy staff produce better and higher volumes of work, so everybody benefits.
As the creators of the applications are always in competition with each other, the price of purchase is forever diminishing and the quality is always improving. New features are always coming into play, interfaces are becoming more user friendly and simple, and processes are becoming shorter and quicker to ensure maximum output from minimum effort. Most applications come with a support system for when there are technical issues so all you need to worry about is the reliability and speed of you and your staff's WiFi systems. Now that you can most likely conduct your business from anywhere in the world, why wouldn't you take advantage of the large variety of applications on offer and ditch your office for something more desirable, such as a shack by the beach or a hut in the mountains?