7 Best HR Tools For Distributed Work

For People teams, creating a holistic HR tech stack that works for your employees and the HR team is equal can sometimes be as elusive as work-life balance 😉 Jokes aside, a good HR tech stack can make or break your company’s distributed work efforts, so it’s an area that requires deliberation and research.

In fact, it’s so important that 82% of People leaders say they needed to scale their HR tech to operate effectively in the past 3 years. But it’s getting harder to choose between dozens of options on the market, let alone combine them to work seamlessly together.

Well, we always strive to inspire, so we made this list of 7 HR tech tools that not only do great things but work great together. They give a holistic view to People teams on how well distributed teams are doing, and most of them offer integrations… did you just start singing with joy? Anyway, let’s dive in!

Core HR: BambooHR

BambooHR is one of the most popular and commonly used HR tools out there and with good reason. The robust features include everything from applicant tracking systems and onboarding, to payroll, time tracking, and PTO management.

BambooHR is a great choice for your core HR needs, and the best thing is that it’s customizable to your needs in both features and price. You can choose the packages and add-ons based on the needs of your People team, and tailor the price accordingly. A nice bonus: most other HR tools offer integrations with BambooHR, so you’ll be able to integrate your tools into one holistic stack.

Distributed workplace culture: Gable

People operations and Workplace leaders in fast-growing companies don’t struggle with geography nearly as much as they do with culture and connection. Empowering employees to make decisions about where they do their best work is only efficient if it gives them tools to build relationships, connect, and collaborate on their own terms.

With Gable, People leaders can manage their hybrid workplace strategy all in one platform. You can use Gable’s network of 700+ workspaces, onboard your own HQ, and combine the two to give everyone the same access regardless of where they live. On top of that, Gable has a robust admin dashboard that enables People leaders to set budgets, design usage policies, gather employee feedback, and analyze that data to make informed decisions about the future of work in their organization. Gable integrates with most major HRIS tools as well as Slack, and offers several different pricing tiers, from pay-as-you-go to enterprise.

Virtual team connection: Donut

Donut is an essential remote work tool that brings the serendipity of watercooler chats to distributed work environments. With Donut, People teams can easily facilitate intros, birthday celebrations, and watercooler chats between employees.

Donut works as a Slack integration and enables HR and People teams to integrate new hires into the culture faster, encourage peer learning and mentorship, and promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The best part: Donut has a free plan for up to 24 users for smaller teams or as a pilot for larger companies before they commit to paid plans.

Employee recognition: Bonusly

An essential factor in retaining distributed employees is recognizing their work, impact, and contribution to the company's mission, performance, and values. Bonusly gives HR teams the chance to implement an efficient and seamless recognition and rewards program that engages employees and keeps them happy and satisfied.

In Bonusly, it’s easy to shout out to coworkers whose work has an impact and promote their effort both privately and publicly with bonuses and points. Employees can then exchange their points for rewards and gift cards, so they get both praise and reward for their exceptional work.

Bonusly has several pricing plans and an option to integrate with your HRIS tools, making it a great addition to your stack.

People Success: Lattice

Lattice is a leader in people success platforms, with a wide array of capabilities and use cases, from performance and analytics to career growth and OKR management. People leaders across the world use Lattice to grow, develop, and engage their employees strategically.

Giving and receiving transparent, valuable feedback keeps both employees and managers on track and empowers People teams to run organizations where workers are aligned on efforts, goals, and performance. When it comes to pricing, Lattice has two basic tiers and a range of add-ons enabling HR and People teams to customize the product to what their teams need. Lattice also offers integrations with all major HRIS providers, making it another plus for convenience.

Global hiring and payroll: Deel

For companies that are growing and using the perks of remote work to expand internationally, Deel can help with hiring and payroll on a global scale. With Deel, you can hire employees and contractors anywhere in the world without having to go through the tedious administrative procedures and paperwork. Additionally, Deel streamlines and automates payroll to all these international workers, enabling HR teams to pay employees everywhere all at once.

Like all of the tools we mentioned above, Deel integrates with all popular HR and invoicing tools, to further simplify the HR workflow and make it easy to focus on people, not paperwork. Their pricing comes in different packages for contractors and full-time employees, but also offers the option of a customized enterprise solution.

Transparency: The Org

With topics like productivity, engagement, and connection always at the forefront of the conversation about distributed work, transparency often takes a back seat. Still, distributed teams rarely get the transparency and visibility into their whole organization. In hyper-growth, what started as a small team where everyone knew each other soon becomes a big company where employees don’t know much about other teams and the organizational structure. The Org aims to fix that, with public org charts for fast-growing companies.

These charts work two different ways: as tools for employees to stay in the loop and connect with their colleagues, and as a way for candidates to see the hiring manager, team structure, and other important information before their first interview. The Org doesn’t integrate with HRIS tools yet, but it’s on their roadmap, and showcasing your org chart publicly is completely free.