Covid-19 delivered a huge blow to all economies around the globe and pushed us into a world of chaos and uncertainty. The pandemic induced changes in the lifestyle and professional habits of almost all people.
Millions of businesses had to shut down — some temporarily and others permanently. Work from home(WFH) emerged as a major employment mode for people who were still lucky enough to retain their jobs.
However, remote work tends to blur the lines between the personal and the professional. It brings with itself a whole new set of challenges — those which you have no idea how to deal with because you have never been in this situation before.
The past year has given all of us a lot of perspectives — on work, life, and everything in general. People adapted. New tools and technologies appeared. And the whole work culture evolved.
In today’s article, we will talk about four must-have tools for remote work that catapulted to the forefront during the pandemic and are still leading their respective industries in 2021.
Zoom
Zoom has become a top choice among video communication platforms and can be used to host or join webinars, web conferences, and video conferences. It is supported across all kinds of devices including smartphones, laptops, tablets and desktops.
Over the course of the last year, Zoom has helped countless remote teams keep in touch with each other and stay updated on all projects.
Main Features
The significant features which made Zoom our favourite video conferencing platform are:
- Meeting Scheduling: Zoom’s integrations with iCal, Gmail and Outlook make sending invites and reminders to attendees of a scheduled meeting a piece of cake.
- Video Quality: Whether you have 10, 100, or 1,000 people in attendance, all the videos shown on the screen will be of HD quality.
- On-call communication: The screen share feature helps you to bring up your presentations and show them to your team members. The chat feature helps in communication via text while the meeting is going on.
- Video Recording: Participants on the call can record the video and once the meeting ends, the recordings get sent to the Zoom folder on your computer.
- Security: Zoom relies on end-to-end encryption as well as waiting rooms, passwords, and role-based user security for your safety.
Pricing
Zoom offers four main pricing plans:-
- Basic: The free plan lets you hold meetings of 40 minutes with up to 100 participants. However, you can have as many back-to-back meetings as you want.
- Pro: The Pro plan is priced at $14.99/month/host. It lets you host meetings for up to 30 hours with 100 participants. It also provides social media streaming and 1 GB of cloud recording storage.
- Business: The Business plan comes at $19.99/month/host. You can host meetings with up to 300 people and unlimited hours. It also boasts extra features like cloud recording transcripts, LTI integrations, company branding, and managed domains.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan is designed for big businesses and starts at $20/month/host but is sold for a minimum volume of 50 hosts. It lets you host up to 500 participants with unlimited cloud storage in addition to all the features in the Business plan and more.
Slack
Slack is a team collaboration app that simplifies communications and external app integrations for the different teams running a business. Thousands of professionals use Slack for project management, human resources, customer support, marketing, IT, sales, financial services, engineering, distance learning, and remote work.
Main Features
- Open Communities: The open communities available in the app fosters networking between users who don’t necessarily work together.
- Archive: Slack has an advanced search function using which you and your team members can easily find past messages and data, instead of reading through weeks of chat history.
- Private Channels: You can enter private channels with one or two members to discuss private work matters that you don’t want the entire team to see.
- Security: Slack uses encryptions like the Enterprise Key Management to keep your messages and other data secure.
- Custom Bots: Slack lets the users create customized artificial entities that can be asked to perform specific tasks track expenses, record complaints, send meeting reminders, embed videos, or even play games.
Pricing
Like Zoom, Slack too offers four pricing options.
- Free: The free plan offers 1:1 video and voice calls with up to 10 integrations. You will also have access to the team’s 10,000 most recent messages.
- Standard: The standard plan comes for $2.67/month. In addition to the features of the free plan, it contains video and group voice calls with 15 participants, unlimited integrations, and full message history.
- Plus: The Plus plan is designed for large businesses and costs $5/month. It contains all the standard features as well as 24/7 support and advanced identity management.
- Enterprise Grid: This is a custom-priced plan for extra-large businesses and those in regulated industries. It offers extra features like large-scale collaboration for up to 500,000 users and a designated support team.
Asana
Asana is a project management platform that is available in web-based and app form. It helps you create visual workflows with tasks, projects, conversations, and dashboards.
It helps you track the various stages of a project from start to finish and see the progress of tasks assigned to different people within the team. The tool ensures that you do not miss any deadlines or forget any tasks.
Main Features
- Automations: Once you establish custom rules for automations, Asana automatically assigns tasks and makes it easy for you to check on their progress. According to Asana, this saves the average businessperson around 70 steps per week.
- Integrations: Asana has almost 100 external integrations available. Some of these include Gmail, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, Slack, Google Calendar, Zapier, Salesforce, Dropbox, Trello, and MailChimp.
Pricing
Similar to the above-mentioned tools, Asana has four pricing plans too.
- Basic: The Basic plan can be used free of cost. It includes some integrations, 15 team collaborations, due dates and assignees, a calendar view, board view, list view, and tasks.
- Premium: The Premium plan costs $10.99/month. It has additional features like private projects and teams, an admin console, milestones and rules, custom fields, and advanced reporting and search.
- Business: The Business plan comes at a cost of $24.99/month. Asana adds more features like further integrations, lock custom fields, approvals, the custom rule builder, proofing, workloads, and a portfolio.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan has a custom pricing that can be decided upon contacting the sales team. It adds priority support, custom branding, block native integrations, data deletion and exports, and user provisions to your account.
EngageBay
EngageBay is an all-in-one platform that integrates and aligns the three main pillars of business growth — marketing, sales, and customer support. It rounds up the features of multiple tools into one, while also drastically cutting the costs.
Main Features
EngageBay’s functionalities are divided across three main modules — Marketing, CRM and Service Bay, and Sales Bay. The features of these modules are as below:-
- The Marketing module helps you in automating your marketing activities by creating or customizing emails, landing pages, online forms, etc and generating analytics for the same.
- The CRM and Sales module helps you to systematically organize your contacts and leads. The entire pipeline of conversion from a contact to a paying customer can be planned out and executed using this module.
- The free Service Bay gives you features like live chat, ticket management, service automation, and more.
Pricing
EngageBay too has four pricing plans. The prices and details are given below:-
- Free: The free plan gives you 1000 contacts and 1000 branded emails per month. It also includes a host of other free features including Email Marketing, Autoresponders, Email Broadcasts, Sequences, Lead Grabbers, Landing Pages, CRM, Helpdesk, Live Chat, etc.
- Basic: The Basic plan costs $8.99/month and includes 10,000 branded emails per month and 15,000 contacts. It has added features like the social suite, integrations, SMS marketing, lead scoring, web pop-ups, and email templates.
- Growth: The Growth plan costs $29.99 per month and expands to 25,000 branded emails and 50,000 contacts. In addition to the basic features, it has service automation, call records, A/B testing, a custom domain, and marketing automation.
- Pro: The most advanced Pro plan costs $47.99 per month. It provides you unlimited contacts and 50,000 branded emails. This plan also includes phone support, a dedicated account manager, custom reporting, role management, and analytics.
Conclusion
In today’s uncertain world, it is easy to feel overwhelmed, anxious, or demotivated. Remote work can be a hindrance in organizing your thoughts and your tasks.
The four crucial tools that we mentioned in this blog can help you keep a track of your professional progress and also constantly keep in touch with your team. So it is important to make these tools a part of your daily life, at least until the pandemic lasts.
