Our 3 Must-Have Tools as a Remote Team
As many teams & businesses move to working remotely, we have created a round-up of our must-have tools to work effectively even when miles apart.
Communication is key!
Slack is our software of choice to communicate with our team or share files. It is an instant messaging application with the capacity to create channels (chat rooms) assigned to projects/topics with specific team members. Need to chat with one person? You can direct message. Need to chat with everyone? There is a general space to have conversations with the whole group. Need to search your conversations or find a specific file? Slack has a searchability feature. It's great and the integration features is another key reason we love this platform. Google and our project management tool, Asana are two applications we have integrated into our team Slack.
Project Management is necessary!
As mentioned above, Asana is our project management tool of choice. The platform provides templates or you can create your project management task timeline from scratch. We use Asana internally as a team to assign tasks & deadlines. However, we on-board many of our clients to keep up with requirements we ask of them and to also allow them to view the status of their project. Our favorite feature of Asana is conversations pertaining to a specific task can stay on topic within that task and this eliminates, or at least decreases confusion and misunderstandings. Because of a decline in confusion and misunderstandings with our team and clients, we have discovered that we have cutback on meetings consequently being more productive.
Connection is vital!
When we do need to meet, our favorite app is Zoom. Zoom allows for virtual meetings between our team and with clients. We can share our screens to share information or provide a visual for project updates. Using the record feature has been used to include those that can't attend or to provide a project explanation that is easier to show rather than explain through words in an email. With the most recent Pandemic, we have seen an increase in creativity of using Zoom; such as networking meetings, education and even happy hours. Zoom, especially when using the video feature can make you feel connected even when you're not in the same space. There is some etiquette to zoom and we beg you to review those before diving in.