As the tech startup scene rises around the world, more and more companies are resulting to remote teams. Tech companies know that international teams bring different perspectives and personalities to a company and hiring a distributed team allows them to get just that.
One of my favorite examples of startups that embrace remote work is Buffer. Buffer has remote work embedded into their now famous “culture”. According to their co-founder Joel Gascoigne, it is not only super productive to be spread around the world but also a complete joy.
If you’re not familiar with remote work, you may be wondering: how do they do it? Well, by being organized and making sure the people they hire are not procrastinating. But also, by communicating and collaborating with each other and this is where using some ready available tools come in handy.
I’ve gathered 11 tools that remote teams use for collaboration, productivity and communication. Take a look:
Communications
Skype is a must for team meetings. It offers instant text messaging and free voice and video calls with other Skype users, including group calls. It also includes the possibility to call phones all around the world for a reduced fee.
Slack is a very useful platform for team communication. It allows you to create open channels for the projects, groups and topics that the whole team shares. Channels include messages, files, images, video and integration with services such as Twitter, Dropbox or Google Drive.
File sharing and management
Dropbox’s basic account allows you to create a virtual space where you can upload up to 2Gb, that you can easily access from any of your devices or share them with your team workers. Dropbox keeps the files synchronized in all the computers. If 2 Gb are not enough, you can get up to 1 Tb for 9,99€/month or contract a business plan with unlimited space and extra features.
Google Drive lets you create and share text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with your teammates. It allows you to decide who you share your documents with and who is able to edit them. What’s more, Google Drive works together with other Google products such as Gmail, Photo or Maps. The free version includes to 15 Gb of disk space, but it’s also possible to get a business account with unlimited space.
Tasks and Projects Management
Trello is a flexible platform that allows teams to organize tasks and projects in a very visual and simple way. It works like a board where you or your teammates drag and drop cards with all about your project, so you can see everything just by glancing at the board.
Asana is a great tool to organize team tasks and projects. It allows you to create tasks for work you plan to do or need a teammate to do, organize them into shared projects, set up due dates. Asana is integrated with many popular tools, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack and many more.
Basecamp is probably the most popular project management application. Easy to use, but powerful and reliable, Basecamp can be used by everyone needing to organise their projects: from freelancers to big companies. Prices start at USD 20 per month.
Development
Cloud9 is a development workspace in the cloud. It allows you to write, run and debug code while collaborating on a public environment –or keep it private, you decide.
Social networking
Buffer is probably the best solution for a team to manage different social accounts, schedule posts and get great analytics of your social networks. The “Small Business” plan 5 team members to work with up to 25 social accounts.
Customer Service
HelpScout is a powerful help desk for teams. It allows you to automate responses, create notes or assign tickets to your mates, among other features. It also includes integration with 40+ popular applications, such as Slack or MailChimp.
ZenDesk is a complete customer support platform that allows dealing with inbound ticket requests from any channel –email, web, social, phone, or chat.
Did I miss your favorite remote working tool?….