The job you do? The kind of work you get involved with? It’s all going to change.

In fact, the change is already underway. Flexible work, collaboration, the global talent pool, the human cloud, the Internet, and everything about work itself are fast changing.

Alex Altman Of Time Magazine writes:

The key to finding jobs of the future will be knowing where to look.

 

The fact is this: the “looking” is going to happen online. Most probably, you’ll end up with flexible work arranges, location independence, and you’ll certainly consider outsourcing.

For a moment, let’s take you over to the other side: the client or the employer side. How would things change for you? What happens if you read Jason Fried’s Rework and consider it as the starting point of how companies can be run or teams can be managed? What if you choose to work with an outsourced team spread all over the world? Does everything you know about management take a back seat?

Thankfully, nothing about management changed. But the medium did. People are still the same. They are just not in the vicinity and the same things motivate them, more or less.

Management can go virtual today. Plus, you have all the tools you need to make things happen, without setting yourself and others up within the confines of an office.

Just what exactly are those tools that can change the way you work and manage remote teams? Here’s a look at some of them:

Asana
Ever drowned in a pool of emails seemingly from different people but it’s about the same task? Ever missed an important email? You’d know the pain of working with emails when you find that your tasks go unfinished, you miss critical emails, and you just don’t know where that important email was.

That’s why using Asana makes sense. It’s a project management tool that aims to keep things where they should be. Projects, tasks, documents, time tracking, and all conversations related to any of the above is all in one place. From the left to the right, the dashboard is intuitive, easy to use, and almost requires no onboarding.

Slack
The projects are assigned virtually. Tasks reside within the projects. Work can happen if you let that be. But then, good communication is at the foundation of great teams. They communicate, discuss, collaborate, and brainstorm together. If you have to manage a remote team, there’s no one sitting in the office. Project collaboration tools like Asana still feel like empty halls.

How do you communicate better with your team? Use Slack – it’s a single point messaging system built for teams of any size. But it’s not just about chatting away with colleagues. It brings in integration with many project collaboration tools, document sharing tools, and multi-purpose systems such as Google Drive.

Google Hangouts
Sometimes, you’d have to show up to your remote teams. Be it for training, for a weekly huddle, for sharing the future plans, discussing launches, or for nothing but just a friendly meeting.

Skype could have been the default choice (and it still is), but Google Hangouts gives you everything Skype does plus the direct integration with Google’s entire suite of products.

Conduct training sessions and save the hangout for future use. Save all the documents shared during a hangout to your drive automatically. Sort important dates and deadlines on Google calendar with a single click.

You see how it plays out?

Evernote For Business
Gone are the days when you had to take a picture of a dish served in a restaurant you happened to go to, and then email it to someone in your team so that they can get inspired and recreate the dish in U.S. Also gone are the days when you’d have to wait for someone in your team to get inspired, collect notes, do research, and then compile it all together to email it to you.

Instead of all that, you’d just use Evernote for Business. Share notes with your colleagues, keep an ever growing “inspiration notebook”, chat with staff anytime; maintain a knowledge base, and more.

Evernote is already a popular choice for note-taking and individual productivity. Bring it to mind your business now.

What are some of your favorite tools? What works for you? How do you manage your remote team?