Top 3 Powerful Software Solutions to Manage Your Remote Team

No doubt one of the toughest years of world history was perhaps 2020. Each and every aspect of life surpassed crisis because of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these uncertain times, remote working played a crucial role in the maintenance and stability of almost every industry of the world economy. Cutting-edge custom software solutions and productive remote team management opened up new ways of working.

Although remote working was never a novelty and has always been a part of many business management strategies, it has shown solemn growth and got more attention since 2020. Companies of all sizes which would never believe in productive remote team management started searching for reliable software outsourcing companies for EPM software, HRM Software, Team Management System, Employee Management system development. Remote software vendors with the most innovative tech solutions proved that stabilizing private and professional life is available for everyone.

For us at CodeRiders, remote working wasn’t an innovation because as a software vendor we have a respectable experience working remotely with our clients abroad. We were quickly adapted to the new working conditions and started searching for more attractive solutions to keep our team spirit. Anyone familiar with CodeRiders knows that we prioritize friendly employee relations and truly believe that this is one of the major reasons we earned a reputation as a reliable software vendor in the international IT industry.

In this article, we’ll talk about the types of custom software solutions that we offer to overcome remote working challenges, facts about remote working, tips for productive remote team management, and a little inside information about CodeRiders.

Reasons Why Increasing Number of Companies Prefer Remote Working (with statistics) 

According to a Quality-of-Life Survey by MIT Sloan School of Management, employees are two times more likely to stay with their current company under the supervision of their current manager who holds productive remote team management. MIT’s Dr. Peter Hirst later on used these studies in his pilot program of changing the way his team perceived remote working. According to his studies:

● 90% stated that their family and private life improved during remote work

● 85% noticed stress reduction

● 80% noticed improvements in their morale and engagement

● 62% felt more trusted and respected

● 93% felt that the whole working process and partnership was better than during in-house work

There is no doubt that remote working gives employees a chance to spend more time with their family and work on self-improvement. Remote working isn’t only an advancement of technology and a privilege in the 21st era, it’s also an exclusive opportunity for people to improve their working routine, work-life balance, management, and leadership skills.

However, remote working also has its challenges that should be addressed and taken care of. If companies want to benefit from these opportunities, resources should be invested in productive remote working management and custom software solutions such as:

● Team management software

● Employee management software

● EPM software or Enterprise performance management system

● HRM software or Human resource management software

●Tailor-made software for a specific company and team management

If the companies or organizations need a one-time software implementation or don’t permanently need software development services, it’s easier and budget-friendly to hire software vendors.

Software vendor management in its turn is plain sailing if performed correctly, which means:

● Providing a clear picture of your project

● Appointing a dedicated project manager

● Communicating often and clearly

● Determining the right KPIs

● Remaining responsive and available

● Understanding cultural differences

Let’s jump into some team management custom software solutions offered by CodeRiders both in case of remote and in-house working routines.

Examples of Custom Software Solutions that Help Benefit from Remote Working

Due to constantly increasing market needs and high competition, the number of companies that prefer to have their custom software over open-source or off-the-shelf software has magnificently doubled up. We state this based on our experience at CodeRiders. We noticed growth in the demand for team management software solutions starting especially from the last year. Here we present some of our solutions that were proved to help both SMEs and big enterprises to control remote working and subdue the latest trend of affairs. These are just some examples, you’re welcome to contact us if you’re interested in these specific examples or have already prepared your own requirements.

Performance Management System or EPM software (Enterprise Performance Management Software)

Although it’s proved that employee satisfaction and performance rate is much higher during remote working, companies still want to make sure that all of their employees are on the right track and there is no stagnation. The most effective way to measure the employee performance rate is to develop appropriate custom software. EPM software is a great solution to control and track your employees. We’re not saying that it’s good to keep your staff strained․ This will artificially burden your employees and make them mentally and physically exhausted. A performance management system is a powerful tool if used correctly.

The number of advantages of these custom-made tools are:

● Keeping your staff in the loop.

● Facilitating your employees’ job by reducing additional efforts spent on unnecessary tasks and by building better communication between team members.

● Periodically documenting and maintaining performance management reviews, feedbacks, and forms.

● Characterizing tasks, goals, activity parts between administrator and subordinates. A custom performance management system incorporates both parties’ targets and approaches to specific strategic plans that are lined up with frameworks and assets. This software clarifies goals and helps out in business processes through various methods and mechanisms.

● Identifying the competency skills and knowledge gaps, and giving better clues on the weak and strong sides of specific employees.

Performance Management System has some similarities with ERP systems or Business Management Software. However, it should not be considered as the same software solution. ERP software mainly addresses the operational processes while Performance Management or EPM software aims at streamlining the management processes, and touches upon inner staff issues as well. If you want to implement custom software quickly and don’t have strict specifications concerning ERP software, we highly recommend choosing custom EPM development. ERP software takes approximately a year to put into action with its all functions while EPM software can be developed within a few months.

On the other hand, this highly depends on the specifications you would like to develop for your custom solution, hence using and testing the software during the development process can also be an option. Many clients think that they should wait for some time specified and estimated by the software vendor until they’ll be able to use the system. However, this isn’t always the case, as we usually offer our clients to use the already developed and completed features while the rest is still under development.

Human Resource Management System (HRM software)

HRM software may feel somehow similar to EPM. So, let’s first state why we also distinguish this type of software in this article and what’s the difference between EPM and HRM software.

We’ve mentioned that EPM software should not be implemented for strictly controlling manpower and tasks, it’s still highly concentrated on the substantial result of the work and drastically requires a successful realization of a specific project, while the Human resource management system’s approach to the goals is a little different. The choice between these two software solutions or maybe both of them highly depends on the specific strategies and philosophy of the company. Many organizations concentrate on the actual results of the project and don’t prioritize friendly employee relations while others stress the importance of building a staff that is like a family. We can’t say which approach is better, because each of these approaches is critically different and are proved to work if performed correctly. However, the fact is that the first type of companies usually goes with EPM software while the other ones prefer HRM software. There is also another variant, which is to mix up the functions of both of these systems and come up with custom software. Some organizations choose this approach as well if there isn’t any strict strategy involved.

HRM software is based on recruiting the right people and working on the further development of their skills and work results. While the core aim of EPM software is a perennial process of communication between managers and their subordinates with additional concomitant features, the key functions of HRM software include:

● Securely storing and organizing data on current, past, and possible employees

● Creating workflows and tracking approvals

● Self-service time tracking

● Payroll system: A tool that automates and manages employee payments. Payroll software tracks all the payments, maintains and stores all the payment records. It’s a great tool to monitor time and attendance, tax information and is often integrated into a Human Resource Management System. However, many small or medium companies sometimes prefer to start with just developing custom Payroll software and enlarge it into HRM software during a specific stage of the business development lifecycle.

● Pre-boarding, on-boarding, and off-boarding automation

For more information on the pros and cons of custom HRM software, EPM software, and their key benefits, we suggest contacting CodeRiders’ team.

Your Custom Software

On top of all these types of software, the number one priority of custom software development is its flexibility and ability to completely automate and operate in favor of a specific company. Custom software development diminishes unnecessary features and functions that confuse and overload the employees’ work and simply pace up the company’s more efficient operation. Thus, we also suggest thinking about software that you think will best fit your company’s needs and priorities. Take some time with your business development and management team, and think of an ideal solution to the problems that you might face. Make a short presentation or project document, technical documentation, or something similar, and find the right software vendor. At CodeRiders, we’re also providing a short project questions template to our clients to help them out in specifying their needs. You’re welcome to contact us for getting one.

Now let’s go over a  few challenges that confirm that it’s time for custom software development:

● Inconsistent execution of business processes: If you don’t have clear guidelines, struggle with unestablished company-wide processes and employee-wide processes, this is a clear alarm that you need your team management software or similar custom software to effectively manage your business.

● Cybersecurity risks and securing home networks and endpoints

● Information access restrictions and authorization

● Lack of remote worker policies and less defined operational workflows

● Challenges in financial management

How to Keep the Team Spirit During Remote Working (Remote team building by CodeRiders) 

Remote working is very beneficial and a win-win co-operation both for employees and employers. However, it’s very important to keep the team morals high. Our team at CodeRiders went remote in March 2020, after the COVID-19 lockdown. We were obliged to make such a change and little did we know that this would come up as a very nice and vigorous idea. The core of our company’s philosophy is to gather people who genuinely care about the company’s well-being and reputation. Thus, we never even thought that remote work is something applicable for us. The key term in our team is communication. Our employees duplicated their pace of work during the lockdown. As a result, the company signed 2 new big contracts and enlarged the team. In 2020, we welcomed 2 new employees to our team, welcomed back our previous dedicated software developer, started an internship program to find new talents, currently are running one more internship program too, and are searching for new talents to join our team (both skilled professionals and interns). Learn more about our 2020 business development formula here and below find how we achieved our goals.

·       Teambuilding activities 

As high team spirit and friendly relations between employees are crucial for CodeRiders, the first worry that crossed our mind after going remote was how to continue team-building activities without physical interaction. Before the lockdown, our team had a comfy space for video games and other fun activities. We would gather around a table have a cup of coffee and share our thoughts, play games, or go countryside for weekend rest. We would also cook some yummy things at home and have a nice gathering during the day.

Our challenge was to keep the team morale by using various proprietary business communication platforms, such as Slack, Trello, Jira, Asana for fun. These platforms are open-source software solutions and are limited with their offerings and features. However, we decided to use some of these platforms during remote working as:

● We already have custom team management systems with our clients

● We don’t have an issue of managing teamwork as everything is applicable and coordinated by the appropriate professionals

Thus, we started using Slack to make sure we’re in touch during the working day. We have two big channels on Slack, one is “Team” and the other one is “Party”. We mostly share work-related information on the Team channel, for example, employees inform when they’re unavailable, have lunch, coffee, a short break, etc. Although the Team channel is a little formal space we still add our CodeRiders-like humor on it. Years ago, employees may have hesitated on “spicing up” their emails with their “nature-like” emojis. However, that was a long time ago. Today emojis are often used in formal discussions as little ice breakers. We created the Party channel for fun. In this channel, we share what is happening with us during the working day besides the job. For example, one of our employees may be annoyed with his/her neighbor, have a tough day at a hospital, with a delivery guy, etc. We may post pictures of our pets, funny videos or photos, interesting articles, news, or anything that happened with us during the day that is worth telling. We also have a bot reminding us about the two main meeting times, one in the early morning and the second one at the end of the day.

Remote Team Lunch 

When we were at the office our team always had lunch together. We usually discussed beforehand what we want to eat for the day and ordered the food online. Sometimes we also went out of the office and had lunch in a cafeteria. We still don’t break the old but gold habit of discussing what to eat at lunch together. For example, one of our colleagues is a great cook and an “advocate” of a healthy lifestyle. She makes the tastiest and the most original, exotic dishes for lunch encouraging us to try out new things. We often tell our colleagues what we are going to eat for that day and sometimes some of them join the initiative of having the same meal together remotely.

To sum up, with the help of cutting-edge software solutions companies or organizations are now able to benefit from remote working and diminish some disadvantages of it. Thanks to various custom team management software solutions, such as EPM software (Enterprise Performance Management system), HRM software (Human Resource Management System), ERP software (Enterprise Resource Planning System), Employee Management Systems, working regimes, and schedules have become more flexible and enjoyable for employees. Today a variety of working methodologies are available and organizations don’t avoid discussing remote, partially, or fully in-office working regimes due to their reliance on innovative software solutions.