The Best Project Management Systems for Remote Teams

You've taken your company remote—congratulations! No, really: moving from a face-to-face work environment to a home-based, remote environment is very nerve-wracking for small business owners. The smaller you are, the more fragile your operations can be. It is all too common to find out—too late—that critical jobs are being left neglected from a lack of oversight and management. 

There are two sides to that coin, however, and some property management company owners take oversight too far—creating a stifling environment for their employees.

 Micromanagement causes fear, resentment, and as much lost productivity as undermanagement can cause. When every move is questioned, employees will stop taking the initiative—content to do only what they are explicitly asked for fear of being in their managers' spotlight.

How do you find the balance and ensure your company is safe and productive during a time of remote work? For so many businesses, this is an unprecedented move. Fortunately, Geekly Media started as a remote company—and some of our best people are still remote to this day. We've learned a thing or two about keeping an eye on your business, and one element that cannot be understated is a great project management system.

You don't have to be a project manager to use project management tools! A lot of the principles can be picked up from spending some time online reading into them, and we'll give a broad overview of some of those methods in our next post. Let's start with the project management program.

A good project management software for property management will help create transparency, accountability, and can help you plan your resources, so you know when a department or employee has too much or too little work. This list will move from easy to learn and use simple project management solutions to the more robust that take a little longer to set up—but also provide more information. 

Monday.com

Price: Basic plans start a $39 per month for us to 5 users.

You get what you put into a project management system—but if you are not ready for all of the bells and whistles, you can start with something simple yet powerful like Monday. With their free trial, you can dip your toes in and see if this is a solution that works for you.

Monday.com is a visually appealing program as well, featuring bright colors typically preferred by visually-oriented workers. It makes the introduction to project management for property managers a little easier because it is a less complication project management program than many others on the market. The benefit to this is it is pretty easy to hop in and get started.

Teamwork Projects

Price: Starting at $9 per month per user.

Teamwork starts to move into the more complicated aspects of project management in that it allows you to manage nearly every element of a project you can think of from estimated time to complete to time tracking per employee and project, to name a few.

This can make it seem a little more complicated at the start because you have to decide how you want to use to tool instead of just plugging in data. This is both a handicap or a blessing based on the user: if you truly embrace it, you'll be able to manage an entire set of operations from this program and pull reports based on any of the elements of the tasks you assign. It isn't as pretty as Monday.com—but for users comfortable with project management, it is the better solution.

HubSpot

Price: Dependent on the package.

HubSpot as a project management program? It can be! When combined with Geekly Media PMOS, or Property Management Operating System, HubSpot not only becomes your process automation program—it also becomes your project management system. Using robust dashboards, tickets, and deals, we have been able to turn HubSpot into both a marketing automation and process automation solution with full reporting. With this project management and property management system, you are never in the dark about the operations in any of your departments.

You can track:

• Tickets per person, department, or pipeline
• Departmental workload
• Trending requests, and more.

The best part is that HubSpot brings everything into one system, so you don't have to use multiple tools to track productivity. Your property management software is directly tied into your process automation software—which is also your CRM and reporting hub—so you always know exactly where to find the information you need to sleep soundly knowing your operations are running smoothly.

We know remote work and project management. These are tools that Geekly Media has been using since we started because we started as a remote company. We've used all of the tools in this blog and can tell you that they all have their merits and will help you during this time.

If you need a little more help running your business remotely, download our free guide, the Property Management Handbook for Successful Remote Teams. We've had hundreds of downloads and have had great feedback—so we hope it will help you make the remote transition more successful, too!