5 Tools for Managing Hybrid Development Teams in 2023

In research by Gallup, 60% of US workers want to stay remote and do not wish to join physical offices, and leaders are often faced with the challenge of designing hybrid workplaces. This new way of working provides flexibility to choose when, how, and where they work. While this may be liberating for some, implementing this change will take work for a lot of us.

For better or worse, one thing is clear: hybrid working will reduce managerial oversight. To stay at the top of your game, you will have to leverage this change. We need hybrid workplace solutions and tools for hybrid development and hybrid events.

Hybrid development tools deal with critical challenges like communication and managing projects. The good news is that we have tools for every purpose to deal with all sorts of challenges in managing hybrid development teams.

We have rounded up five such categories of tools for you to consider:

1. Project management tools

2. Communication tool

3. Time management tool

4. Collaboration tool

5. Employee engagement tool

Here are the 5 Tools for Managing Hybrid Development Teams

1. ProofHub for Project Management

ProofHub eliminates the need to use many tools and simplifies the entire hybrid management process. It comes with the necessary tools to foster better team collaboration and stay on top of your tasks. With the ability to manage projects and provide better team communication, ProofHub is perfect for both in-house and remote teams. It assists you with every project and team management function, like managing tasks, keeping track of team progress, tracking time, communicating with teams, generating project reports, and more.

Let's take a closer look at what makes ProofHub ideal for managing hybrid development teams.

Key Features:

• Task Management

Effective task management is crucial if you want to manage hybrid development teams. It can help your team keep track of their priorities and keep up with the deadlines. It becomes super easy to assign tasks, set priorities, track progress, avoid bottlenecks and stay on top of your team's work.

• Team Collaboration

ProofHub's inbuilt chat application will get you instant replies and make direct messaging with your team members and clients. You can use the chat tool to communicate with your colleagues personally or through group chat.

• Project Reports

ProofHub provides detailed custom reports for an individual team member or the entire project that helps you analyze project progress. You can check the amount of work completed against the total work with a detailed burn-up-chart.

• Time Tracking

Time tracking helps the team members to analyze their own performance. It enables you to analyze the overall work hours and assess the productivity of the team members. It brings all your time data to a central place, provides visibility, transparency and lets you manage resources efficiently.

2. Slack for Communication

Slack is a popular and easy-to-use team management tool used by businesses in different industries. It allows several workplaces for other companies or various projects within one company and manages them from a single application. Slack enhances communication between teams and their members to save the high productivity of the company's performance. It provides the ability to split teams into different chats or even workplaces related to specific work projects.

Key Features:

• Know team availability

Viewing the dot on the person's profile picture will help you understand whether the person is working. Moreover, if the account is integrated with Gmail, it shows whether the respective person is out of the office, in a meeting, or on vacation.

• Set reminders

We as humans sometimes need to remember to attend important meetings or critical points that may further affect the quality of the work. But all thanks to Slack, you can set reminders to get notifications on any message from any channel or any direct message.

• Voice and video call

If you are stuck somewhere in a project, the VoIP calling feature can work best for you. Through Slack, you can make calls to work buddies or clients from anywhere, anytime. You can get your work done in a single click by sharing your ideas and screen too.

• Apps and Integrations

This tool allows you to connect with other services like Office 365, ClickUp, Google, HubSpot, Zoho, Outlook calendar, Asana, Trella, Todoist, etc. Once you integrate, the entire team will get notified about the task or activity which is done on that tool.

3. Calendly for Time management tools

Calendly is used to schedule appointments, meetings, and events and sync calendars with staff and clients. It makes scheduling more efficient, primarily when your teams work in different time zones. Employees can add their availability preferences in the app, and they are all set.

Key Features:

• Profile customization

Calendly allows you to customize your profile and remove its branding so that you can deliver a scheduling experience that aligns with your brand.

• Time zone detection

It eliminates confusion between parties located in different time zones by displaying the availability of your invitee’s time zone.

• Scheduling notice

It gives you enough notice so that you prepare for scheduled tasks and appointments and avoid last-minute meetings.

• Notifications

It will notify you of reminders, texts, and find a way to improve on no-show rates.

• Streamlining collaboration

Calendly lets you empower your team and create a highly efficient workflow. You can view various types of meetings, allow invitees to schedule an appointment with relevant individuals.

• Admin Features

The team members set up scheduling for all types of events. Metrics and reporting allows users to gain insight into campaign tracking associated with scheduling and invitee engagement.

4. Miro for Collaboration

Miro is a visual online whiteboard collaboration platform that provides every team with an intuitive, engaging, and in-person collaboration experience. You can add sticky notes, bounce ideas off your team, and exercise creativity.

Key Features:

• Create and innovate faster

Empower cross-functional discovery and brainstorming through canvas, robust set of widgets, pre-built templates, and powerful platform capabilities. You can utilize sticky notes, pens, shapes, arrows, and more. Also unleash creativity and work the way you want to with an infinite canvas. Lastly use pre-built templates or create your own templates.

• Make collaboration easier

Engage distributed and remote teams in brainstorming, processes, workshops, and decision making with digital workspace with asynchronous and synchronous collaboration. With Screen sharing presentations you can share the work directly from Miro platform. You can also track how team members engage with your boards. Managers can get review, feedback, and approvals with multiple communication options.

• Centralize and standardize communication

Create a hub for cross-functional work that works with all other tools. Find boards faster through easy folder organization and structure. Streamline workflow with integrations like Slack, Jira, Google, Sketch, and more. Painlessly scale account administration and user permissions company-wide.

5. Weekdone for Employee Engagement Tool

Weekdone is a progress and productivity tracking platform that improves communication among employees and managers. Ahead of each week, employees can complete their profile with plans for the week, project status and report any obstacles to their success.

Managers can track their direct reports’ toward goals and recognize achievements. Weekdone has set team goals that align with the company’s vision and inform each weekly plan. This instills a sense of purpose among employees and has a positive impact on employee engagement.

Key Features:

• People management

1:1s, feedback, and recognition help you know the status of the team and provide crucial feedback.

• Socialization

Its activity newsfeed and engagement tools bring the team together and know what’s happening and build team spirit.

• Productivity

Weekdone enhances productivity using the same weekly planning and check-in-methodologies, already used by Google, eBay, and Skype.

Conclusion

The right hybrid management tools can help developers streamline day-to-day tasks, increase productivity and engagement and form genuine personal connections.

Even though many organizations are returning to the office, a big chunk of the workforce is still working remotely. They need to adapt to those employees' needs and maintain a hybrid environment.