The Best Software for Remote Teams
Best Software for Remote Teams
No employee is an island. Your company relies on collaboration across teams and departments, but COVID-19 changed the traditional office setting where it all took place. Since the pandemic, many companies rushed towards bandaid fixes to enable remote work. However, it’s become abundantly clear that even beyond the pandemic, remote work is here to stay. It’s time for companies to evaluate the best remote work software for the long term future.
The software solutions needed to effectively manage and engage teams can be boiled down into three main buckets:
Project Management Software
Collaboration Software
Communication Software
Project Management Software
Baton passes presented challenges even in-office when you sat next to everyone on your team. It’s no surprise that remote work has intensified the room for error in projects that require organizing and attaining timely inputs from multiple people.
Fortunately, project management software options have come a long way. Here are three popular ones for consideration:
Big Players
Asana is one of the pioneers of PM software. Asana is great at creating visual project maps and assigning tasks, priorities and deadlines.
Trello works with cards that can be dragged and dropped easily and hold all the details and files for each task neatly. It also integrates with many apps.
Basecamp is used by thousands of PM teams. It features a social-media like interface and a more casual collaboration style.
Rising Stars
Monday is a highly visual platform that has customizable workflows and templates. It’s a friendly option for people unfamiliar with PM software. It is one of the fastest growing platforms and received $150M in funding in mid 2019.
ClickUp combines the visual experience of Monday with the drag-and-drop experience of Trello to merge the best of both world.
These project management tools let everyone see where each piece of the project is in the creation process. This reduces a lot of the redundant emails and multi-person meetings typically used to verify if everything is on track.
“Monday eliminates so many human errors from the process of planning and significantly speeds up our throughput as a department.”
- Roee Adler, Co-Founder and CEO of WeWork
Project management collaboration software requires you to know what features you’ll use most during your selection. Each option has a slightly different specialty. Luckily though, most PM software has either a free version or free trial!
Collaboration Software
Why Collaboration is Harder While Working Remote
The obvious issue with work from home is finding software that replaces the face-to-face interactions in an office. It’s easy for people to feel disconnected from their coworkers in their home office, not to mention any new teammates hired during this abrupt change.
An office environment promotes casual collaboration. You remember chatting with coworkers over lunch and having a project breakthrough. Getting a collaboration software to replace that requires careful consideration so people want to use it.
True collaboration software goes beyond the project-management aspects of checking off tasks and visualizing final inputs. Collaboration software that meets that definition supports multiple people working and contributing to documents, project boards, and in some cases video meetings.
Collaboration software should focus on idea sharing and moving towards the team’s goals. Here are three:
Big Players
Google Drive & Docs is gaining hockey-stick growth in popularity. Easily edit and share documents with multiple people, tag and assign tasks, video chat and more.
Microsoft Teams & Sharepoint is great because it’s already included in your costs if your company has a Microsoft subscription. Teams allows you to set up team chats around projects. Sharepoint let’s multiple people share and edit files in real time.
InVision is particularly useful for design teams, who have in many ways taken the biggest hit from remote work given their highly collaborative nature. Created by designers, InVision allows teams to edit, mock up, and share prototypes for visual projects seamlessly.
Rising Stars
Flock works to bring all of your collaboration across multiple apps into one place. Instead of walling itself off, Flock integrates with dozens of apps for project management (i.e. Asana and Trello), file sharing (i.e. Google Drive, One Drive, and Drop Box), social media and much more.
Mural is built for visual collaboration. Alongside the ability to comment and chat real time through documents, it offers a variety of more interactive features that let you draw, create project boards, use stick notes, and design frameworks.
“[Most of our designers] are located across the globe. Our team’s speed and agility depends on those relationships, and on using a tool like InVision to share prototypes, show flow boards, and keep track of comments without having to meet every time a design is changed.”
- Erica Raymond, Senior User Experience Designer at IBM.
Communication Software
COVID-19 has taught many how much got done in unofficial meetings, over lunch, or using pop-in chats. Therefore, the right remote work software for these chats is essential. Companies everywhere need a solution that allows for 1-1 chats, team meetings, and even company wide virtual events.
Since the remote work rush, many software creators have packed their solutions with extra features to make communication software even better. Here are some of the remote-world’s favourites:
Big Players
Zoom - if you haven’t heard of Zoom yet, you might be living under a rock. It’s reputation is backed by its scale and features. Zoom lets you conference up to 1000 people, easily screenshare, create breakout rooms for group discussion, and integrate with your calendar.
Google Meet is a great alternative - and free! Video conference, chat, and the ability to mark up screenshares all in one. Google meet pairs well with Google Chat which is Google’s direct messaging solution.
Slack let’s you video conference, screenshare, call and chat as well. However the added benefit is it’s very user-friendly DM interface where you can have conversation channels, group chats, and 1-1 messaging and file sharing.
RISING STARS:
Facebook Workplace - sure, Facebook is not a “small player”, but in the world of work Facebook only started dipping its toes in recently. Workplace let’s you have 1-1 and multi-person video conferencing, create “Groups” for collaboration, have a company newsfeed and host a knowledge library.
Loom lets you easily record video messages with screenshare and drawing tools. It leapfrogs over calendar clashes by allowing you to record and send messages on your time. Then your team can view on their time. Loom enables you to communicate new information and feedback in a way that is much more impactful than a call or email.
“Our teams tell us they’re working together and solving problems much faster, because although they are spread across the globe, Slack makes it like you’re in the same room.”
- Pam Whitmore, Group Manager, IT at Intuit
Having the right tools can be the difference between teams working efficiently vs. missing deadlines. It can also make or break a culture that has been based on collaboration and the casual but frequent communication style. Investing in finding your best-fit remote work software can do more than just replace old ways of doing. It can actually make your team’s collaboration stronger and easier.
Looking for the talent that will elevate your remote teams? Contact us today to get access to the top talent leading companies through the pandemic.