At Meister, our goal is more than just “replicating” a traditional office space on a digital level. Our tools are intuitive, which means they’re easy to use and require little to no onboarding. They promote effective communication and ensure you can coordinate better across your in-office, remote and hybrid projects.
Remote work feeling like a chore? Check out Meister’s 6 Top Tips for Working from Home effectively.
This article provides an overview of the:
Pros, cons, and challenges of remote workspaces.
MeisterTask features for managing your remote projects.
MeisterTask’s value in rollout for remote teams.
Remote Work: Pros, Cons and Challenges
Remote work is popular for a reason. You decide your own hours, manage your own schedule, and eliminate commuting time. This can encourage your team to trust and rely on each other more. It can also help improve your sense of identity outside of work, which could possibly help balance life and work priorities better.
Keep workplace motivation at an all-time high with the tips from this useful blog post.
On the other hand, remote workspaces include their own challenges as well. Your team could experience low morale through a lack of social contact with colleagues. Remote workers might also feel pressured to always be ‘switched on’ and readily available to respond to every email, message, and notification – a phenomenon known as “job creep”. These can lead to difficulties in:
Collaboration between teams.
C****oordinating across projects.
Prioritizing essential tasks over minor, recurring tasks.
Effectively managing time.
Coordinating across your online tools.
Ensuring privacy and data security.
MeisterTask reliably addresses such issues in Remote Work through its task management features, ease of use and high security standards. In the next section, we’ll look at how MeisterTask can help you:
Streamline communication using structured tasks.
Facilitate collaborative and efficient workflows for remote workers.
Maintain an overview of progress, even when your team is distributed.
Integrate MeisterTask with other tools in your remote work toolbox.
Managing Remote Work Like A Superstar: What MeisterTask Brings To The Table
MeisterTask features are specifically designed to support you in efficiently managing remote projects. Let’s look at some of the solutions in more detail.
The Challenge: Communication Around Your Projects is Unclear
Barrage of emails? Lack of clarity over task delegation? Inadequate communication strategies hinder project progress, worsen employee frustration, and decrease productivity. If you’re part of a growing company****, you are at a greater risk from these challenges.
The Solution: Centralize Your Communication.
MeisterTask enables efficient, centralized communication****. By keeping communication about tasks on the tasks themselves, you’ll never lose track of discussions about work and updates on tasks.
You can make your tasks as simple or detailed as you want to provide all the information project members need. Checklists, attachments, and due dates are all updated in real time, meaning your remote team is always on the same page.
The Challenge: Getting An Overview Of Remote Projects
You might be in the habit of writing down your tasks in a journal or on sticky notes. However, if you do that, you’re also probably the only one who can see them. Your remote team might just be left out of the loop entirely, and has no overview of ongoing tasks.
Task delegation can be an opaque process. This lowers team morale, worsens coordination across tasks, and makes it difficult to manage projects as a whole. For an efficient digital workflow, it’s important to have an overview of tasks across your remote projects.
Effective task delegation is key to a happy workspace. Find out more in this informative blog post.
The Solution: Kanban Boards to Improve Collaboration and Visibility
MeisterTask Kanban-style task overview boards transform the face of workflow transparency. Your customizable Kanban-style project board can provide an at-a-glance overview of task progress. This helps you easily understand where each task is in your workflow.
By making to-dos visible, Kanban boards can also help:
Update teams on task expectations.
Synchronize tasks.
Allocate resources, time, and effort more efficiently.
Kanban boards split workflows by stages of completion. For MeisterTask, you can easily move tasks across sections by just dragging and dropping them. In the tool, you can make as many sections as you like in a project.
A basic example of these sections could be “Open”, “In Progress”, and “Done.” However, you can easily customize these sections to better reflect your workflow. This enables you to get an overview of your tasks’ progress with a single glance.
Just try it for yourself – it’s one of the most gratifying feelings in the world being able to mark a task as “Complete.”
The Challenge: Prioritizing Essential Tasks
The inability to prioritize major tasks over minor ones wastes time and productivity. It also decreases your teammates’ sense of alignment and commitment to project goals. A useful infographic by Atlassian identifies excessive emails, pointless meetings, social media, and disruptions in the workflow as major distractors to employee productivity. When applied to remote workspaces, these challenges are even more evident.
Lost productivity has disturbing long-term consequences: a 2018 Udemy survey demonstrates how it costs American businesses more than $650 billion annually.
A good deal of time and effort within projects is spent on creating reports that document progress and provide updates. Such reports are essential, as they could directly influence project outcomes. However, putting project reports together can also be time-consuming, overly detailed, and might detract from other, main tasks.
The Solution: MeisterTask Reports for Data-Driven Insights
MeisterTask Reports gathers project data and presents it in a beautiful, accessible way. The Reports feature displays project performance using real-time data and customizable parameters. Staying on top of current information on projects enables impactful, data-driven decisions, and generates valuable insights through regular reporting. This helps in analyzing productivity and taking early action to keep projects on track within MeisterTask.
MeisterTask Reports is only available in Pro (limited functionality), Business, and Enterprise plans. Upgrade to these so that you can:
Create customized reports for projects filtered by assignee, status, date, and others.
Identify areas of strength and improvement within your workflow.
Align with key internal stakeholders.
Make visible the results of your team’s hard work.
The Challenge: Too Much “Clickwork”
Your remote workspace needs all the support it can get for greater efficiency and productivity. One way of doing this is saving time on recurring administrative tasks. Wouldn’t it be a relief knowing that many such tasks could be completed automatically without any effort from your end? Automating these could overcome issues such as:
Time wasted in sending reminder emails.
Sorting endlessly through tasks in order to notify editors for reviewing.
Interrupting your workflow to update task status and/or due dates.
The Solution: MeisterTask Automations
MeisterTask boasts an impressive set of automations that can save your time and productivity. Automations are automatic actions that take place following a predefined “trigger action”, when tasks are created, or moved across project sections. These immediately take care of repetitive tasks within your workflow. This leaves you more time to focus your efforts and energy on your main tasks.
Use MeisterTask’s automations to automatically:
Assign tasks to different collaborators.
Update the status, tags, and due dates of tasks.
Move tasks across different projects.
Track time across tasks.
Add predefined checklists to tasks.
Send emails and Slack messages to different collaborators.
And much, much more. You can even configure 2000+ automations via Zapier!
What can MeisterTask Automations do for you? Find out more on this interesting blog post****.
The Challenge: Efficiently Managing Time Across Tasks
Certain tasks might require multiple teammates collaborating on them, and perhaps completing different checklist items at different times. It’s important to stay aware of when tasks are scheduled, to ensure transparency and efficiency in your workflow.
Kanban boards offer you an excellent overview of your tasks, who’s responsible, and the communication across them. However, it’s important to get an overview of the timing and scheduling of tasks as well. This is especially helpful for planning and coordinating better with your remote team.
The Solution: MeisterTask Timeline
MeisterTask’s excellent Timeline feature is a Gantt-style chart that provides a customizable calendar view of scheduled tasks. The Timelines feature enables you to:
Spot bottlenecks in advance, and take decisive action immediately.
Manage time flexibly by shifting tasks across calendar dates.
Visualize upcoming tasks.
The Timeline feature enables greater and more detailed planning, scheduling, and coordination across tasks. Each task includes information such as the assignees responsible for it, task duration, and what phase of the project it is located within.
The Challenge: Using And Coordinating Across Multiple Online Platforms
You can’t build a house with nothing but a hammer. You need a variety of digital tools to ensure an efficient remote workplace. MeisterTask effortlessly connects different online tools to your workflow with its variety of integrations to ensure the smoothest remote workspace experience.
The Solution: MeisterTask Integrations
MeisterTask integrates with tools like:
No more back and forth across apps – MeisterTask connects your digital toolbox to ensure that your tasks are only a click away from where the work happens. Here you can update tasks and documents in real-time to keep your team on the same page.
Curious? Find out more about MeisterTask’s integrations on our Integrations page.
Rolling Out MeisterTask For Your Remote Team
The prospect of learning a new workplace tool – particularly in remote workspaces – can result in a collective groan from all teams alike. Extensive training and onboarding for new remote tools isn’t likely to encourage an enthusiastic response, especially with tasks piling on endlessly in the background.
The Solution: MeisterTask!
Few things will make your team happier than finding a tool that’s easy, high-value, and doesn’t take much time to pick up. What better than an online tool that enables you to concentrate on your main tasks and get work done? MeisterTask’s intuitive, easy-to-use design is based on smooth user experience. This eliminates the need for extensive training and onboarding. Even if you don’t have a lot of tech experience, you can still use it effectively. Just sign up****, open MeisterTask, and get to work!
Find out how to get your team on board with MeisterTask in this informative post****.
Rather than replicating traditional office-based methods remotely, MeisterTask enables customizable and transparent workflows meant to adapt to your team’s remote working style****, not the other way around. Align team priorities, increase visibility to team efforts across tasks, tailor your workflows to suit remote work, and enable your team to get more done.
Ready to kickstart your remote workspace adventure? Contact our Sales team today to see how MeisterTask can transform your digital workspace first-hand. We offer a no-obligation, no-cost trial.
