10 best work-from-home tools for HR leaders

Working from home can make simple tasks challenging. What’s better said in person needs to be communicated via screen, and often to a name displayed rather than a face.

It becomes even more difficult when an HR leader like you needs to connect with candidates for onboarding or a 1-on-1 session to gather feedback.

But the pandemic bridged the gap between technology and people. Many tools surfaced to make working from home easier. The market is flooded today with apps and software that can help you connect with employees online effortlessly. What's important is that you consider certain factors before selecting the tools. 

How to select a work-from-home tool?

You can weigh the pros and cons of the software and apps on these parameters to know which ones to choose.

1. Ease of Use

Everything should be easy to use, from the user interface to the features. For example, you don’t want interruptions during employee engagement activities to figure out how to let people in the meeting room.

2. Return on Investment (ROI)

Returns often drive your business decisions as a leader. And a work-from-home tool will be no exception. The software you pick should be worth putting money into and give equivalent returns. Check the subscription rates, packages, what you get in the deal, its reviews, and how much a renewal costs. Also, see if they offer a corporate discount.

3. Accessibility

The software must be cloud-based and easy to download and log in. Since you and your employees will be working remotely, a difficult-to-install app can be a deal-breaker. And it should be accessible via all mobile devices.

4. Effectiveness

WFH tools have a purpose to solve and must do it seamlessly. For example, if you need a group video calling app to hold a team brainstorming session, the tool must provide access to at least twenty-five people, a whiteboard, easy sharing of screens and documents, and smooth integration with Google Drive.

Once you know what you need, it is time to pick a tool. Fortunately, there are tools to assist you with every task.

Here’s our list.

Top 10 work-from-home tools

Work-from-home tools for employee onboarding

1. Trello

Trello makes managing different HR processes easy and seamless. It offers templates for hiring and onboarding that you can use to organize the processes.

How does it work?

It offers an interactive to-do list and lets you add and assign tasks to team members. You can also add due dates to each task. You can select from a list of templates and start adding projects. There is a template for every task an HR leader undertakes, like posting a job, talent acquisition, hiring, and onboarding. It also presents an HR Team Learning Tracker to keep track of all the training modules your team has completed. The 30-60-90 day plan template can help you track employee performance in the first three months of joining.

Pricing

Their free plan is very suitable for team management. As your requirements increase, you can consider their annual plans, which are cheaper than monthly plans. Their standard plan is available at $5, premium at $10, and enterprise annual plan at $17.50 per user per month.

Advantages

• Offers a free plan that works very well
• Easy to use. Easy drag and drop option using the pre-built templates.
• Cloud-based. Just log in and start using it.
• Fully customizable to suit your branding needs.

2. Talmundo

You can capture and manage the initial stages of an employee's life cycle with Talmundo. It offers an insightful platform that helps you engage new hires and onboard them smoothly. It can help new employees settle down faster and de-risk your hiring investments.

How does it work?

It smoothly integrates with your human resources management system (HRMS) and captures an employee’s journey from pre-boarding to onboarding to exit. It creates a highly engaging experience for new employees so they can hit the ground running. For HR managers, it uses automation to customize the complete onboarding process as per your brand.

Pricing

You can contact Talmundo for a quote, schedule a demo, or have a 15-minute call with their executive to discuss pricing.

Advantages

• Fully customizable per your branding
• Cloud-based and accessible via mobile devices
• Easily integrates with your HRMS and Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
• Highly engaging and interactive interface
• Best suited for medium to large enterprises

Work-from-home tools for compliance

3. Bambee

Imagine putting your recruiting, onboarding, and training tasks on autopilot. Bambee is an excellent software for small and new enterprises that offers onboarding and compliance tracking from a single interface.

How does it work?

Bambee helps you create and manage company policies and offers the assistance of a dedicated HR manager. This manager is a certified HR professional with relevant experience for a company of your size and industry. No extra fee is levied for the dedicated Bambee manager. It offers these features as well:

• Analyzes your HR policies and regulations to identify compliance gaps
• Gathers employee 360-feedback              
• Delivers suggestions for performance improvement
• Remote guidance sessions whenever you need

Pricing

Bambee’s plans escalate as the number of your employees rises. It offers plans starting from $94/mo, billed annually for new organizations with no employees. The prices and plans change as the workforce increases from 1-4, 5-19, 20-49, 50-99, 100-149, 150-249, and 250+ employees.

Advantages

• Easy to use remotely
• Helps in legal compliance, which can be time-consuming for HR leaders
• Automates all your HR processes so you can access everything on the go
• Provides a dedicated HR Manager available remotely for expert guidance and support
• Offers compliance advice for multiple states and federal laws

Work-from-home tools for talent management

4. FactoHR

Polished over the years, FactoHR offers a flexible plug-and-play interface for all HR-related activities:

• Recruitment
• Attendance management
• Payroll management
• Learning management
• KPI-based performance management
• Retirement management

How does it work?

It is a mobile-first Human Capital Management (HCM) platform. It automates all your HR operations to deliver seamless workforce management.

FactoHR’s Remote Employee Monitoring Software is an excellent tool for monitoring employee productivity and performance in a WFH or hybrid model. This module offers features like Punch with Selfie, which allows your employees to upload a selfie and tag their geolocation to mark attendance. It auto generates a daily attendance report for your records. Plus, the Timesheet tool enables you to track your employees’ working hours and task completion statuses.

Pricing

FactoHR offers four plans—Essential, Advance Velocity, Bolster, and Performer. The Advance Velocity is their most popular plan. It offers onboarding, employee data management, attendance and leave management, employee engagement tools, payroll, and survey management with dashboard access.  

Advantages

• Easily customizable one-stop platform for all HR activities
• Smooth integration with your ATS and HRMS
• Advance payroll management with compliance tracking
• Complete dashboard accessibility via mobile devices

Work-from-home tools for project management

5. Asana

It is an excellent tool from the Facebook founding team for managing personal productivity. Asana lets you know who’s doing what within your team at a time from a single dashboard. Above all, it helps in project management for the complete HR team.

How does it work?

Asana is a cloud-based software that lets you interact with your team to create and manage tasks and create custom fields and projects from a dashboard. It offers:

• Automated inbox with updates
• Customizable projects
• In-depth task tracking  
• Team communication tools
• Easy integration with your HRMS
• Effortless access to files

Pricing

Asana keeps it simple with three plans. The basic plan is free of cost and offers unlimited projects. The premium plan is $10.99/mo, and the business is $24.99/mo, billed annually. They also provide heavy discounts for non-profit organizations.

Advantages

• Real-time dashboard updates for your projects
• Privacy control for sensitive and confidential projects
• Rules application to automate repetitive and mundane tasks
• Highly user friendly
• Extensive integration with any software your organization uses
• Allows collaboration so you can invite users to view and edit the projects as per need
• A free basic plan with great features

Work-from-home tools for people management

6. PeopleHR

It is an excellent tool for managing incentive structure, reporting, training modules, performance appraisals, onboarding functions, and overall employee database. PeopleHR allows your team to self-serve remotely while giving you complete operational control.

How does it work?

PeopleHR automates and streamlines all processes for you:

• Payroll
• Employee shifts and online timesheets
• Ripple software to manage workflow
• Analysis and report generation
• Leave and attendance management
• Recruitment software that syncs with your ATS
• Mobile app for remote access
• Simple appraisal platform to enhance your employee engagement
• A robust 4-step implementation process to execute what you plan            

Pricing

PeopleHR has three plans—Professional starting at £5 per employee per month, then Enterprise at £7, and Elite at £9. They also allow you to book a trial for free or a 4-minutes demo.

Advantages

• Simplified, intuitive interface that you and your employees can get used to within minutes
• Enhances efficiency by automating repetitive and mundane tasks like leave updation and regular reminders to complete probation or training modules.
• Access to all employee data from a single interface
• Enables quicker decision-making by simplified dashboard access
• Facilitates employees to self-serve through controlled data access  

Work-from-home tools for payroll management

7. TriNet

If you’re looking for a Professional Employment Organization (PEO), look no further. TriNet offers comprehensive solutions for recruitment, onboarding, training, payroll and benefits management, and performance management.

How does it work?

It lets you access all information from a single cloud-based platform:

• Time tracking
• Expenses
• Attendance and leaves
• Vacation tracking
• Employee training statuses
• Health perks
• Insurance

Their integration center has multiple pre-built integration modules that allow you to sync all HR management software with TriNet effortlessly. The Integrated Affordable Care Act (ACA) solution evaluates your compliance status and generates reports.

Their workforce analytics platform analyzes all operations and provides access to data on a dashboard. It helps identify the trends and patterns of employee performance based on your KPIs.

Pricing

TriNet charges a fixed fee on a per-employee per-month basis. Their plans are flexible, and charges are reduced if your employee:

• Fully utilizes social security deductions
• Gets a salary hike
• Reaches the maximum limit of unemployment taxes
• Selects pre-tax medical deductions

Advantages

• An excellent payroll management tool
• Superior employee performance management features
• Easy to setup
• Consistent rates
• Highly integrable platform

Work-from-home tools for employee engagement

8. Slack

There is a bright chance you are already using this brilliant tool for communication and employee engagement. Slack brings all your communication and HR operations on a single platform, thus making it easy to communicate, access information, and make decisions. It fits perfectly with your employee engagement strategy.

How does it work?

Besides employee engagement, you can use Slack for recruiting, onboarding, and automating all processes. It integrates your desktop, mobile operating systems, ATS, and HRMS to keep your teams connected everywhere.

• Highlights team availability in real time
• Allows you to track time and tasks easily
• Instant notifications help you stay updated when someone calls out to you for a project update
• Voice and video calls enabled
• Privacy control so you can create private groups for confidential discussions
• The channel details feature informs new employees about what a discussion is about
• Multiple language support

Pricing

Slack offers four plans—Free, Pro for $7.25, and Business+ for $12.50 per user per month. They also have an Enterprise Grid plan, the most intensive plan suitable for large organizations.

Advantages

• 10% increase in employee satisfaction score
• Employees reach complete productivity levels 24% faster
• Makes remote work much easier
• Very easily integrable with your in-house software and apps
• A great free-of-cost plan
• An excellent alternative to endless work calls and long threads of emails
• Team time zone extension works very well for employees working in different time zones
• Makes searching for key messages and threads super easy.

9. Glint

Everything you need for employee engagement is offered by Glint. It is people-centric software with a simple interface that your employees will find easy to use. It maps everything from employee lifecycle and manager & team effectiveness to their performance and successes. It gives a voice to your employees and helps you respond to them effectively.

How does it work?

Glint offers a plethora of features:

• Pulse, 360-degree surveys taken and recorded in real time

• Employee lifecycle

• Employee recognition

• KPI and targets management

• Employee experience management

• Feedback collection and analysis

• One platform to capture and display critical insights from all feedback programs

• Guides HR managers to implement the feedback

And this year, Glint transitioned from being a part of the LinkedIn family to the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform. The platform has received great reviews for its employee engagement interface. They combine a superb design with organizational development and behavioral sciences to give you a holistic experience.

Pricing

They follow a quotation-based model. You can view a demo or contact their team for a quote. While they don’t offer a free trial, they don’t charge a setup fee.

Advantages

• Not just a reporting platform but helps in feedback implementation too
• Makes feedback collection and analysis super easy
• Generates simplified actionable insights for the leaders
• Simple and easy-to-use interface
• Multi-language support

Work-from-home tools for employee productivity

 10. DeskTime

A desktop and mobile tracking app that is known to increase employee productivity by up to 30% in the first few weeks of use. DeskTime involves all members of your team to track individual and overall progress. Timesheets are often useless and unreliable. That’s why DeskTime goes above and beyond.

How does it work?

Its tracker starts when you turn on the computer and stops when you turn it off. It generates data analysis and customized reports for the work done by your team and their productivity score.

It offers:

• Automated time tracking
• Automated document title tracking, which tracks how much time you spend on a document
• Offline time tracking
• Option to turn off tracking for some personal time off
• Pomodoro break reminders to reduce mental fatigue
• Expense analysis
• Attendance and leave scheduling and recording
• Project tracking
• Your teammates' contact information accessible from the interface
• Booking features for workspaces, parking spaces, office equipment, and various amenities.

Besides, it allows for third-party integrations and is accessible via mobile, app, and URL.

Pricing

DeskTime offers three plans—Pro at $6.42, Premium at $9.17, and Enterprise at $18.33 per user per month billed annually. And then, DeskTime Lite is available free of cost for single-user access. They also offer a free trial for two weeks.

Advantages

• Very user friendly
• Helps quickly identify productivity improvement areas
• Detects the apps, webpages, and tools used by a user
• Share regular screenshots of the desktop for activity analysis
• Leaders can fully control the privacy and data access
• Great support feature

These tools add significant value to your organization. But if employee engagement is your focus, inFeedo’s Amber has been breaking some boundaries too.

Let’s take a look.

How can Amber make remote work better?

An AI-powered tool accessible remotely, Amber has revolutionized how you connect with your employees no matter where they are. It is more than an HR chatbot. It is an empathetic employee experience bot that connects with your employees to gather real-time feedback and generate actionable reports for your perusal.

How does it work?

Amber automates real-time employee feedback collection through pulse, exit, and other anonymous surveys. She approaches new employees to help them settle down quicker in the company. It identifies their pain points and presents insights so you can work on their feedback.

She recognizes tone and produces empathetic responses to make employees comfortable. This helps them open up to her and takes the load off your shoulders. So you don’t need to connect with every employee individually.

Advantages

• An in-depth company culture evaluation
• Helps analyze employee happiness and satisfaction scores
• Helps identify high-risk employees on the verge of quitting
• Engages employees in remote locations
• Cloud-based software accessible remotely

More than 250+ employee-first brands trust Amber for employee engagement. She has engaged with over 700,000 employees globally across 60+ countries till now.

Amber is more than just software.

She can be your company’s Chief Listening Officer.