by Doreen Martel

Created on: December 26, 2009

If you are managing a team of people who all work at home, one of the many challenges you face is how to keep everyone on track and make sure that they can communicate with each other.  Work at home teams generally need to have the same software, have access to the same applications and be able to communicate effectively. As a work at home manager, you do not want to have to invest thousands of dollars in software only to find out that someone does not have the ability to use it. This is where online applications come in handy.

Time tracking

If you want to ensure that hours are billed accurately, you may want to explore some of the time tracking software that is available online.   WR Time Tracking is a free online application that allows your team members to log in, place a memo to let you know what they are working on and log off when they are finished with the task. As the manager, you create a master account and you can set up other subsidiary accounts for your team members.

Office programs

It is very likely that many of your work at home team members will have different versions of Office. In order to ensure that members of your team can easily convert their applications for sharing, there are a number of options. You can use Google documents which provides a suite of tools including a word processor, spreadsheets and presentation programs.  Zoho also offers a free set of office programs and also includes databases and contact management systems.  Open Office is another suite which is an open source program. Your team members can download Open Office and use it to create documents, share documents and more.

Email programs

There are many free email options that can be utilized for your work at home team. Depending on which office products you wish to use you can select Yahoo! mail, Google mail (gmail) or you can get free mail programs from Zoho. There are other free mail services including rocketmail, pobox, hotmail and more. Decide which is best for your work at home team depending on your individual needs.

Task Managers

One challenge for managing work at home teams is ensuring that everyone knows what they are supposed to be working on. There are many options for setting up tasks that can be shared to one team member or to a number of team members.  Alerts can be set up in Yahoo! calendar, Google Calendar or in Zoho to set up a task list and assign the appropriate parts of the task to other team members.

Summary

Fortunately you no longer have to invest thousands of dollars in software to make sure that your work at home team can effectively communicate and share work. With these tasks combined with programs like Skype, Yahoo! chat and Google chat, your work at home team can be as effective as a team in a traditional office setting.

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