Silke English
There are plenty of lists on the world wide web, that tell you what tools are The Best to Work With While Being Part of a Remote Team. We’ve seen them all: “100 tools for this and that”, “10 best whatsoever”. Hands down, do you have the time to try them all? This is why we decided to tell you what is practical to us. This blog post is not going to explain those tools in detail, but more so let you know what we like best about them. All our departments chipped in, so this list includes recommendations from marketers to developers and how they are valuable to us at Yodel.
We live in Slack. This is our main communication channel. We say “good morning” in our #lounge channel and share our thoughts in dedicated channels for #marketing, #development, #product, etc. We all love how Slack makes it easy to share things with our coworkers. Also, our voice bot is an integration for Slack. This means our business phone calls are all made through this business chat platform as well. National as well as international with the help of Yodel.
Our beloved Trello boards. We have our roadmap on Trello. We have Trello boards for marketing and sales and a developer Trello board. Some of us even have a Trello board for our own use. For all of us, it has a great value to have our to-do’s visualized. Trello is easy to use and your boards can be shared with others. Your coworker assigns you another task? Trello will notify you. Another major plus point is, that you can see changes in real-time while being on the board with your coworkers.
As a remote team, it is easy to get disconnected from your coworkers. There is no break room where you can see them for a few minutes or stop by their desk to ask something. Sitting all alone in your home office can become dull. It is nice for us to see our work family every day and talk “screen to screen” about non-work related things as well as ask important questions that need attention right away. Another great feature about Whereby is that you see who enters a channel and the call does not end when you are the only one left. This gives your team members the opportunity to join and leave as they please.
A share-your-screen tool is vital for a remote team. Especially when you are collaborating a lot and need to show your coworker your screen for better understanding. Screenhero is our tool of choice. One great feature is that you can also interact on the shared screen of your team member. Our departments have different use cases but the most common is that we use it when one of the development team needs to explain something to the marketers or vice versa. Uncomplicated and efficient. Thumbs up for Screenhero!
Our own tool is designed for helping with business phone calls and offering an easy way of working collaboratively on a phone call. This is why it is a great tool for remote teams. Since we are distributed and don’t have an office space, we also don’t have someone working at the front desk, who usually is the first instance to take a call. This is what Yodel does for us — 24/7. Answering calls and routing them to the right team so they can jointly work on them. Big plus point, it is integrated into our business chat — so the whole team can see who is in a call and if necessary join the party.
This is a tool for our development team. GitHub is great to work collaboratively on coding. All versions of your code are saved in a repository. Everyone who is working on the code can pull it from there and make changes that GitHub will show to the others. The tool also allows you to make comments within the code for code reviews. This gives you the advantage to see what your team is working on and enables everyone to voice input on how to improve the software you are building together — all in real-time.
The whole team works with Google Workspace since we need to work on certain files together. These files are stored in our team drive and therefore accessible to everyone on our team on any device. Unlike on Google’s My Drive, all files belong to the team and not an individual. We also love Google Docs and Google Sheets. Most of our content is written on Google Docs because our team members have the option to comment or leave suggestions on the draft before it goes online.
Feel free to complete this list with your favorite tools in the comments below! We would love to hear what works best for you and which tools you and your remote team wouldn’t want to miss anymore.
