There are so many reasons that remote work is wonderful, but sometimes, that distance makes it more difficult to communicate, to collaborate and to work together as a team. When you can’t just hop over to the next desk and ask someone a question, look over their shoulders at their screen, or move one of their stickie notes on their scrum board, things are just a little more difficult. We’ve talked to over a hundred remote teams and here’s a list of apps, websites, and ideas that can help facilitate remote work:
Apps/programs:
Document sharing and concurrent editing: G-suite, Evernote, Dropbox
Messaging: Slack, Telegram, Saferoom. Slack is amazing and by far the most frequently cited by the teams we’ve interviewed. Telegram is great for team members who might have consistent internet (messages get through much faster and easier), and Saferoom is a new program where all messages are double-encrypted and secured.
Project Management/To-Do list: Asana, Trello, Todoist, Google Keep. Each is wonderful in their own way, it just depends on what works best for your team.
All of the above: Basecamp. Basecamp is a document sharing, messaging and project management app that is perfect for small- to medium-sized businesses. Basecamp is built by a remote team and works great for remote teams.
Video-conference: Zoom, Google Hangouts. There’s plenty of other video-conferencing apps, but we prefer these two and the majority of remote teams rely on Zoom.
Virtual office: Sococo. If you miss the hustle and bustle of an office environment, try Sococo. It simulates an office environment where you can tap someone on the shoulder and pull them into a conference room for a quick meeting, or hang out and co-work or chat near the watercooler. Remotion has a new take on this virtual office, where all employees appear as a bubble on your computer screen and you can quickly jump into a videochat with them or change your bubble to reflect your mood or task. It’s a fun and quick way to be connected while working remotely.
Asynchronous Video messaging: Marco Polo. Marco Polo allows you to record video messages to one person or to a group. Those who receive the message can watch it in real time or at their convenience. We like this app since it has the time delay of a messaging app with the video body language cues from a video-conference.
Design Collaboration app: InVision
Collaborative Zooming Whiteboard: Mural, RealTime Board, Conceptboard
Sticky Notes: Canvanizer: Canvanizer is a sticky notes site that teams can work on together. They have canvas templates such as Business Model Canvas, SWOT analysis, HR Innovation Canvas, and Pitch Planner Canvas, or you can create your own.
Software development: Jira, GitHub
Time Converter: World Time Buddy
Meeting Scheduler: Doodle, When2Meet, wheniwork, Calendly
Slack integrations: Almost all of the remote teams that we talked to used Slack as their team communication tool. Slack has some great bots and integrations to help your remote team do their best work and have fun. Here are some of our favorites:
Donut: randomly pairs team members together for an in-person or virtual “getting to know you” meeting
Standuply: Virtual daily standups on slack
Hey Taco: a fun way to show gratitude for teammates who went above and beyond. Give them a virtual taco
Kyber: create tasks, announcements, polls, and meetings on slack easily
Jell: When you work remotely, especially over multiple time zones, it’s kind of hard to organize one central meeting. You’ll get a good overview of each team member’s status in three core questions.
Humaxa: Max is a fun, useful bot that lives in Slack. Max asks for feedback, starts discussions, offers mentoring, and delivers recognition.
Resources for remote teams:
Team assessment and team-work accelerator: Team Prelude works with newly formed remote teams to identify commonalities and create a shared vocabulary for better teamwork.
Leadership training for remote work: Sacha at Virtual Work Insider started her own remote team journey 10 years ago and is now consulting with companies to help set up their distributed work teams with some powerful educational modules.
Remote Manager Training and Community: Remote-How has 6 week online series of classes to build and manage great remote teams.
Payments and Legal: Deel. Deel helps remote teams with the compliance and payment problems of having a remote team distributed all over the world. Deel helps you make sure that your contractors and staff members are in compliance with all local labor laws, collects any legal documents that you might need, and then helps easily pay your people in their currency.
Retreat planning: Our friends at ETA has a remote retreat planning and travel product that helps remote teams gather more easily. Rendezvous helps you find a convenient time and location for your retreat, and also helps get your people there and track it all while staying under budget. Check it out here: https://www.eta.ai/rendezvous.html
Tips and best practices
Celebrations and acknowledgments: When your team is distributed across the world, celebrations and acknowledgments are vital to creating a great team culture. Our friends at Smack Happy Design have a great way to celebrate and acknowledge staff members. They have a box with an MVP trophy, a medal and a crown that last month’s MVP sends to next month’s MVP. Then during their all-hands meeting, the last month’s MVP lists the reasons and acknowledges what the new MVP has done and how everyone appreciates them. What a fun way to show appreciation and create a culture of gratitude.
Co-working time: We’ve found that the best remote workers have some (2–4 hours) overlap with their team, where everyone is expected to respond rapidly to questions or comments, and some time to work alone, undisrupted by meetings and messages. That way, any problems are resolved without having to wait a whole workday, but team members also have time to be productive. Some teams even virtually co-work together by having an open video-conference where anyone can join and work.
Retreats: Many of the remote teams that we’ve talked with gather their staff members together for an annual or bi-annual team retreat. This retreat is great as a team-bonding and team-building experience, and typically mixes work (co-working, an industry-specific conference, or strategic planning) with fun (board games, cooking together, and team-building activities such as scavenger hunts and ropes courses). With COVID-19, gathering in person is impossible, but you can still have a mini-retreat, with strategic planning, coworking, and virtual teambuilding activities.
Team-building for Remote Teams
Team-building for remote teams: We’ve created three team-building games for remote teams that is based on the neuroscience of human connections. Our remote team-building games are mixed-reality puzzle solving adventures, played on video-conference, designed for teams to communicate, collaborate and develop rapport. Players must solve a mystery by discovering clues, piecing together puzzles and working as a team. To learn more about our remote team-building game, click here.
What are some of your favorite tools, tips and tricks for remote work? Let us know what you use to help your remote team run well and have fun. Drop us a line at hello at patchworkadventures.com.