Top 15 Must-Have Tools To Manage Remote Employees |2024|

With the rise of remote work, employees and teams are now dispersed across various time zones and locations. This poses a significant challenge for businesses in managing them effectively. However, this challenge can be addressed with the help of suitable remote workforce management software. In this article, we'll explore the top 15 tools to manage remote employees effectively.

Whether you are managing a remote workforce or a hybrid team, implementing the right tools is crucial. The right remote tool helps ensure employees remain engaged and productive, regardless of location. But how do you know which tool to deploy?

Well, it depends on what you are looking for. To make it easier for you, we've categorized different types of tools below to manage remote employees. These insights will help you determine which category tool you need for your organization. Accordingly, you can decide which one to deploy as you explore the tools to manage remote employees.

Types Of Tools To Manage Remote Employees

Here are 5 basic types of tools to manage remote employees:

1. Remote Employee Onboarding Software

These digital platforms help your team streamline the process of bringing new remote hires on board. They simplify tasks such as completing documentation, assigning applications access permissions, and adding them to different communication channels.

2. Remote Communication and Collaboration Tools

These tools are essential for keeping team members connected, whether you need to schedule a team-wide virtual meeting or have a one-on-one chat. They ensure everyone is in the loop and help support team building within the organization.

3. Remote Project Management Tools

These tools assist your team in organizing and assigning tasks to remote employees. They help break down projects into manageable parts, delegate tasks appropriately, and ensure a smooth workflow for remote teams.

4. Remote Productivity and Performance Support Tools

IT teams use these tools to monitor and enhance the productivity of their remote employees. They help improve work quality and minimize distractions.

5. Remote Time Management Apps

These apps help remote workers plan, organize, and track their time effectively, ensuring they make the most out of their workday.

Now that you are familiar with the types of tools to manage remote employees, it will be much easier for you to decide which one to choose. So, let's proceed further and explore each tool in detail.

List Of Top 15 Tools To Manage Remote Employees

Below, we have compiled a list of the top 15 must-have tools to effectively manage your remote employees:

1: Zluri

Type of Tool: All-In-One Remote/On-Premises Employee Management Platform

Zluri stands out as an all-in-one solution because it offers a wide range of capabilities for managing remote/hybrid/on-premises employees and handling SaaS applications. This means you don't have to look elsewhere for separate tools to manage users and SaaS apps. Everything you need to manage a remote work setup is in one place. What does it offer?

Well, Zluri offers three main solutions: SaaS Management, Access Management, and Access Review. Each solution has unique capabilities that help manage remote employees and applications. Let's break down what each solution brings forth:

• SaaS management

Whether your organization operates remotely, has a physical office setup, or even a hybrid work model, having complete visibility into your SaaS stack is crucial. Zluri's SaaS management solution ensures you have this visibility by using nine different discovery methods—MDMs, IDPs & SSO, Direct integration with apps, Finance & Expense management systems, CASBs, HRMS, Directories, Desktop Agents, Browser extension,  to identify every application within your organization, eliminating the risk of shadow IT.

Zluri’s discovery methods

But what information does this discovery method gather? Well, it gathers information like the number of applications present within the organization, details on which employees are accessing these applications, app owners, risk scores, and compliance status. All this data is presented in one centralized dashboard. This centralized view further helps your team manage applications effectively.

• Access Management

Zluri’s access management solution

To ensure your remote employees start being productive from day one, Zluri's access management solution provides all the necessary access based on their role during onboarding.

Further, employees need access to specific apps when roles change during mid-lifecycle. So, to ensure employees gain access to required solutions at the right time, Zluri's access management offers an app catalog & access request feature. This feature allows employees to request the app access they need and gain quick access to it without waiting for days. This further helps ensure your remote employees don't face any interruption in their work.

Basically, it ensures that employees have the right level of access to the right applications at the right time throughout their lifecycle.

Furthermore, when employees depart from the organization, it ensures the safety of critical data by revoking their app access and removing them from groups and channels in one go.

Note: You can create automated workflows to perform these tasks, saving significant time and reducing the chances of errors.

• Access review

Zluri’s access review solution

Regular reviews are essential to maintaining a secure access environment. Zluri takes care of this by conducting periodic access reviews, ensuring that employees only have access to what they need and nothing more. This proactive approach safeguards your data from potential threats and keeps your access environment well-governed.

Book a demo now to learn more about Zluri’s each solution.  

Key Features

• HRMS integration: Zluri directly integrates with HRMS, which helps provide your team with up-to-date information about employees' profiles.

For instance, if a new employee is hired or an employee role is being changed, by integrating with HRMS, Zluri updates all this data in a centralized dashboard, which makes it easier for the IT team to access

• Contextual app recommendation: Zluri provides contextual app recommendations based on an employee's department and role while creating an onboarding workflow. This saves considerable time for your team, eliminating the need for manual app searches aligned with specific job requirements.
• In-app suggestions: With this feature of Zluri's access management, your team can add employees to different channels, groups, or projects.
• App catalog & access request: Zluri offers an app catalog featuring pre-approved SaaS applications. Employees just have to raise an app access request, and the IT team will further verify their identity, review the app, and grant them access.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.7/5
• Capterra: 4.9/5

2: We360.ai

Type of Tool: Performance Management

We360.ai, one of the notable tools to manage remote employees, is a performance analysis and management platform built to enhance employees' productivity and streamline project management, especially in remote work environments. It provides features like real-time monitoring, which offers deep insights into why and how your remote employees work. These insights allow managers to see what's happening instantly and take action if needed.

Key Features

• Customizable Productivity Reports: We360.ai generates customizable reports to track and analyze remote employee productivity metrics. These reports help identify strengths and improvement areas, further enhancing overall efficiency.
• Real-time Progress Updates: It provides instant updates on project status, which helps IT teams stay informed about ongoing tasks and identify potential bottlenecks.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.6/5
• Capterra: 4.3/5

3: Teramind

Type of Tool: Employee Monitoring

Teramind is an advanced platform that offers different tools to manage remote employees. For example, it provides a centralized dashboard that gathers all information related to an employee, including whether they are online or not, their location, time worked, and their activity (you can get a live view of a remote employee's screen). But are these insights helpful? This information helps IT teams take necessary actions to boost remote workers' performance and ensure productivity throughout their working hours.

Key Features

• Application and Website Monitoring: Teramind's monitoring tool offers detailed insights into employee activities by tracking the applications and websites they frequently access. This capability helps IT teams determine whether these activities are related to work or involve non-work-related tasks.
• Behavioral Alerts (BI) Reports: The platform generates reports on employee actions, such as frequent switches between email and Outlook. This feature helps IT teams monitor productivity and ensure employees remain focused on their assigned tasks.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.6/5
• Capterra: 4.6/5

4: Basecamp By 37signals

Type of Tool: Project Management

Basecamp is one of the notable tools to manage remote employees that help manage remote employees by organizing their tasks (what they need to do) and monitoring their progress. Furthermore, it enables employees to chat with colleagues, create to-do lists, receive feedback, schedule projects, share files, and create daily or weekly stand-ups.

It also includes a portal for outside clients (they can access the platform directly through this portal), allowing them to view and manage projects and deliverables and work with the project team. This ensures that clients can stay informed and involved in the project.

Key Features

• Project Prioritization and Organization: Basecamp allows remote employees to pin and reorder projects based on priority. This feature ensures that they can focus on the most critical tasks first. It also allows employees to organize projects effectively, which helps ensure they don't miss any project completion deadlines.
• Real-Time Group Chat: It offers a real-time group chat feature that helps remote employees quickly communicate with other team members. They can have real-time conversations, collaborate on urgent tasks, and quickly resolve any questions or issues they may have.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.1/5
• Capterra: 4.3/5

5: BambooHR

Type of Tool: Onboarding Software

BambooHR, being one of the notable tools to manage remote employees, streamlines the remote employee onboarding process through automation and frees up your team from performing repetitive tasks. Furthermore, it ensures your team spends more time introducing new hires to the company culture and practices rather than getting caught up with mundane tasks.

Besides the automated onboarding feature, BambooHR offers other key features, including data analytics (HRIS), an applicant tracking system, compensation, and culture management.

Key Features

• Support Electronic Signatures and Provides New Hire Packet Template: It supports electronic signatures, allowing new hires to digitally sign necessary documents, reducing paperwork, and speeding up the onboarding process. Additionally, customizable new hire packet templates enable IT teams to customize the onboarding experience to fit each employee's role's specific needs and responsibilities.

This personalization ensures that new employees receive relevant information and access to resources from the start, further enhancing the overall employee experience.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5
• Capterra: 4.6/5

6: Hubstaff Tasks

Type of Tool: Task & Time Tracking Software

Hubstaff Tasks provides detailed insights into remote employees' work activities. It tracks the hours employees work and what tasks they spend their time on, making it easier for managers to monitor their productivity. The tool also helps uncover tasks that are taking too long and costing too much, allowing managers to identify and address the underlying issues.

Additionally, by adding pay rates for each team member, Hubstaff Task shows each project's return on investment (ROI), helping businesses understand which tasks are most profitable.

Key Features

• Multiple Views for Clarity: IT teams can easily switch between Kanban and Timeline views to monitor their employees' work. This allows IT teams to see at a glance which tasks are being worked on, who is responsible for each task, and their progress.
• Integrated Time Tracking: With built-in time tracking, remote employees can log their work hours directly on the boards. This feature gives IT teams real-time insights into project progress and individual contributions.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.6/5
• Capterra: 4.6/5

7: ServiceNow ITSM

Type of Tool: IT Service Management

ServiceNow's IT Service Management tool is amongst one of the notable tools to manage remote employees. It streamlines and automates service request processes. Besides, it allows employees to submit service requests from anywhere, ensuring they can get the support they need anytime. Furthermore, the tool's AI-powered self-service portal enables employees to resolve common issues on their own, reducing dependency on IT support. Also, the mobile app keeps employees informed about the status of their requests, enhancing communication and transparency.

Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with remote desktop support and productivity tools, helping your teams efficiently manage remote employees.

Key Features

• Incident management: ServiceNow ITSM utilizes machine learning to assign incidents or issues (technical or non-technical) to the appropriate team members for swift resolution. This helps ensure that remote employees can continue working without major interruptions.
• Smart Recommendations: ServiceNow ITSM assists IT teams in resolving issues with remote employees by automatically suggesting relevant content and solutions. This helps ensure that technical issues are addressed promptly with minimal service disruptions.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5
• Capterra: 4.6/5

8: Okta Workforce Identity Cloud

Type of Tool: Identity Management

Okta Workforce Identity, being one of the most preferred tools to manage remote employees, helps manage them by providing secure and seamless access to the apps and resources they need to perform their respective jobs. Further, it offers single sign-on, allowing employees to access multiple apps with one set of credentials, simplifying the login process and reducing password fatigue. To ensure only authorized users access sensitive data, it provides Multi-factor authentication (MFA) features to add an extra layer of security.

Key Features

• Adaptive Security Policies: By automatically adjusting security measures based on user behavior and location, Okta ensures that remote employees have the right level of access and security protections wherever they work.
• Lifecycle Management: Okta automates the onboarding and offboarding processes for remote employees. This automation feature allows IT teams to grant new hires access to necessary applications with just a few clicks, enabling employees to start being productive from day one. Okta promptly revokes their access when employees leave the organization, reducing security risks associated with former employees.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5
• Capterra: 4.7/5

9: EmpMonitor

Type of Tool: Employee Engagement & Productivity Management Software

EmpMonitor streamlines remote and hybrid workforce management with features that provide daily statistics through active time tracking, activity monitoring, and screenshots. This helps managers stay informed about their team's performance.

Furthermore, it also focuses on data security and privacy protection, safeguarding all data by storing it in a system-created database before moving it to a server database.

EmpMonitor includes project and task management capabilities and offers a user-friendly interface for creating, assigning, and tracking tasks. This feature is quite helpful for monitoring progress in real-time and effectively meeting project deadlines.

Key Features

• User Activity Monitoring: EmpMonitor simplifies the task of maintaining a productive team by offering robust user activity monitoring software and context-rich reporting. This feature provides a detailed analysis of employees' activities on a daily or hourly basis, giving insights into how time is utilized across different tasks. This helps efficiently track and enhance employees' productivity.
• Insider Threat Prevention: Insider threat prevention capabilities enhance organizational security. Tracking how employees use company assets (including compromised or restricted platforms) identifies and mitigates potentially harmful actions in real-time. This feature strengthens defense mechanisms against negligent and malicious employee behavior, reducing the risk of insider threats impacting business operations.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.9/5
• Capterra: 4.4/5

10: WorkStatus

Type of Tool: Remote Workforce Management Software

Workstatus is another one of the acclaimed tools to manage remote employees. It offers time-tracking features that enable IT teams to manage and track the time of remote teams, ensuring they do more in less time.

Furthermore, its live location analytics features provide real-time insights into remote work locations using geofencing, allowing visualization of team distribution across different areas. This helps in understanding where team members are working from and planning accordingly. Additionally, Workstatus consolidates all employees' information in one place, making it easier to manage entire teams effectively.

Key Features

• Activity monitoring: This feature helps IT teams manage both remote and on-premise employees through a centralized employee management tool. This tool ensures that all employee activities are tracked and monitored in one place, providing a complete overview of productivity and performance.
• GPS tracking: This feature maintains a constant record of employees' locations, which helps IT teams verify that employees are where they are supposed to be during work hours.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.6/5

11: Jira

Type of Tool: Project Management Software

Jira being one of the most preferred tools to manage remote employees helps manage them by providing a wide range of features, such as boards to track task progress, real-time insights reports, and roadmaps to assign work and manage team activities.

Scrum boards allow teams to break large, complex projects into manageable pieces. Roadmaps help keep remote employees and the organization in sync by clearly outlining project plans and assignments. And reports and dashboards offer actionable insights within the context of your work, ensuring teams are always up to date.

Key Features

• Project Boards: Jira's project boards provide the status of tasks at each stage of the workflow. For remote teams, this is particularly useful as it allows managers and team members to track the status of each task. This transparency ensures everyone knows what needs to be done, who is working on what, and the priorities. It helps remote employees stay organized and focused, while managers can easily monitor progress.
• Dependency Management: Jira's dependency management feature maps out how tasks should be completed. This is crucial because it helps identify potential bottlenecks before they cause delays. By understanding which tasks depend on the completion of others, teams can plan more effectively and avoid situations where another employee's incomplete work blocks another.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5
• Capterra: 4.4/5

12: Asana

Type of Tool:  AI Work Management Platform

Asana is one of the well-known tools to manage remote employees. It helps your teams create and organize tasks, divide work among team members, set deadlines, and monitor progress. Also, it allows your teams to assign tasks to employees and notify them about significant project developments, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

It also offers other key capabilities, such as allowing your team to view work on a calendar to easily spot schedule gaps and overlaps and assigning clear task ownership so everyone knows who is responsible.

Key Features

• Task Organizing & Tracking: Asana allows teams to break down projects into manageable tasks, and each task can be tracked through various stages of completion. This makes it easier for IT teams to see each task's progress.
• Custom Notifications: It sends notifications to remote employees so that they can stay updated with task additions, project status updates, and messages.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5
• Capterra: 4.5/5

13: Clockify

Type of Tool: Time Tracker

Clockify is one of the best time tracking tools to manage remote employee productivity and efficiency. It offers— a timer to track remote employees work hours in real time, a weekly timesheet for logging hours, an auto tracker to monitor apps and websites used, and a kiosk feature for clocking in from shared devices. Furthermore, Clockify provides detailed reports to analyze and export tracked time, activity logs to see who is working on what.

In addition, Clockify boosts productivity by helping remote employees track their time spent on various activities, improving their time management skills.  

Key Features

• Idle Detection: The feature identifies when an employee is away from their computer for a set duration. This helps accurately track active working hours versus idle time, providing insights into productivity patterns.
• Auto Tracker: Clockify helps track the time employees spend on various applications. This allows IT teams to determine whether employees are accessing and engaging with apps that are required for their work.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5
• Capterra: 4.7/5

14: Slack

Type of Tool: Communication Tool

Slack helps manage remote employees by providing a centralized real-time collaboration and communication platform. It organizes conversations into channels for specific teams, projects, or topics, making it easy for remote employees to stay informed and participate in relevant discussions. Slack ensures seamless remote team collaboration with features like direct messaging, voice and video calls, file/document sharing, and integration with other productivity tools. Overall, Slack makes sure remote teams stay connected and collaborate efficiently.

It keeps a record of all communications so that remote employees do not miss out on information.  

Key Features

• Search Functionality: Slack's search feature allows remote employees to quickly locate past messages, files, and conversations. This capability enhances productivity by saving time that would otherwise be spent searching for information.
• Notifications and Alerts: Customizable notifications in Slack ensure that remote employees stay updated on important messages and activities in real-time. By receiving timely alerts, they can promptly respond to urgent tasks, participate in discussions, and collaborate effectively.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5
• Capterra: 4.7/5

15: TeamViewer

Type of Tool: IT Support Management

TeamViewer helps manage remote employees by providing a powerful remote management tool that enhances productivity and support. IT teams can guide staff in resolving technical issues from any location, ensuring employees can stay focused on their tasks and customers.

Furthermore, TeamViewer's compatibility with nearly all devices and operating systems ensures seamless and instant remote support.

Key Features

• Augmented Reality Technology: TeamViewer's augmented reality technology provides visual assistance, allowing IT teams to quickly identify and resolve technical issues. This further helps manage remote employees by minimizing downtime and ensuring they can continue working efficiently without prolonged interruptions.
• Centralized Management: TeamViewer allows IT teams to connect to any device at any time and centrally monitor and manage remote employees. This helps them to provide quick support whenever employees face technical issues. This further reduces the risk of operation disruptions.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5
• Capterra: 4.6/5

Deploy A Suitable Tool To Manage Remote Employees Effectively

So, there you have it—an overview of the top 15 tools to manage your employees effectively. Now, the responsibility of choosing the right tools lies with you. But how do you know which one is suitable? You can consider factors like your needs, organization size, and budget while deciding.

For instance, deploy Zluri if you need an all-in-one solution for managing remote employees– onboarding, access management, or performance management. If you're looking for a specific tool to gain valuable insights into remote employees' work activities, Basecamp by 37signals can be the ideal choice. Also, to provide IT support to your remote team, consider TeamViewer.

However, don't stop there. Review the other tools thoroughly as well. Each tool has its own strengths and can be a perfect fit depending on your specific requirements. Make your choice based on your business needs and compatibility with your workforce.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why do you need a remote employee management tool?

Managing remote employees can be challenging due to factors like different time zones, lack of face-to-face interaction, and maintaining productivity. Remote management tools help streamline communication, ensure accountability, and track productivity, making remote work more efficient.

Can remote employee management tools be used for hybrid teams?

Yes, these tools are versatile and can be used to manage both fully remote teams and hybrid teams (a mix of remote and on-site employees).