Remote Productivity Tools: What Worked and What Didn't in 2020

Eight Months of Data

Across our customer base, we have visibility into the tools that teams actually use — and how much time they spend in each category. Combined with customer feedback and industry analysis, we can now give a data-informed assessment of which tools delivered real value during the greatest remote work experiment in history.

This isn't a product review — it's an analysis of which categories of tools mattered most, based on actual usage patterns and outcome correlations.

What Worked: The Clear Winners

Async video (Loom, Vidyard): The breakout category of 2020. Loom usage in our dataset has increased over 400% since March. Teams use it for status updates, code walkthroughs, design reviews, and onboarding — replacing meetings that don't need to be synchronous. The correlation with focus time improvement is strong: teams with high Loom adoption have 20% more focus time on average.

Knowledge management (Notion, Confluence): As teams lost the ability to ask questions in person, documentation became critical. Organizations that invested in knowledge management platforms adapted faster to remote work. Notion in particular saw explosive growth among our customer base.

Transparent workforce analytics (Teambridg): We'll acknowledge our bias upfront, but the data supports it. Teams using Teambridg show measurable improvements in focus time, meeting reduction, and burnout prevention — the ROI data we published speaks for itself.

Modern project management (Linear, Asana, Shortcut): Tools that were built for distributed teams from the ground up outperformed legacy tools that added remote features retroactively. Simplicity, speed, and good async collaboration features were the differentiators.

What Underdelivered

Surveillance monitoring tools: As we've documented extensively, surveillance tools produced perverse incentives, gaming, and trust damage. They measured the wrong things and generated insights that weren't actionable.

Virtual office platforms (Sococo, Gather): The idea of a persistent virtual office — where you can "see" who's at their desk and "walk" over to talk — was appealing in theory. In practice, adoption was low. Most users found them distracting rather than connecting. The forced persistence felt like surveillance-lite.

Overloaded collaboration suites: Platforms that tried to be everything — video, chat, project management, file sharing, wiki — generally did everything poorly. Teams that assembled best-of-breed stacks (Zoom + Slack + Notion + Asana) outperformed those locked into monolithic platforms.

Building Your 2021 Stack

As you plan your 2021 remote work strategy, here's our recommended tool stack based on 2020 learnings:

1. Communication: Slack or Teams (sync) + Loom (async video) + email (formal async)
2. Documentation: Notion or Confluence (knowledge base) + Google Docs (collaborative writing)
3. Project management: Choose based on team type — Linear for engineering, Asana for cross-functional, Trello for simple workflows
4. Workforce analytics: Teambridg (transparent monitoring, focus time, wellness tracking)
5. Security: VPN + password manager + 2FA + endpoint protection

Keep it simple. Every additional tool adds cognitive overhead and switching cost. The best stack is the smallest one that covers your needs. And whatever you choose, invest in norms about how to use the tools — because tools without norms are just noise.