The coronavirus crisis has forced upon us a global experiment in working remotely. Fortunately, we’ve never been so well equipped to work from home. To help you get the most out of these times of forced isolation, we’ve brought together some of the best tools you can find online to collaborate with your team members.
You may just find that with these tools, working in person (in most cases) may be unnecessary.
Zoom is one of the most popular and reliable HD video conferencing software solutions in the world capable of handling up to 1,000 video participants and 10,000 viewers.
It’s incredibly easy to use and can integrate with a huge number of other services, which has led to it becoming the standard for remote communication.
Otter is and offers one of the best automated voice transcription services in the market. It allows users to record, search, play, edit, organise, and share your conversations from any device.
The ability to automatically transcribe audio with high accuracy is going to unlock huge amounts of information contained within videos and podcasts by making the searchable.
Otter also integrates with Zoom, transcribing your conversations, making all of your virtual meetings easily accessible and searchable.
Loom is a simple screen capture service that makes it incredibly easy to provide feedback on whatever you feel like. Once you start using software like this to provide feedback, you‘ll shudder to think how much time you’ve wasted typing out feedback.
The range of uses is limited by your imagination. You can use it to provide feedback on design work, record presentations or online courses — whatever!
Figma has been described as the ‘Google Docs for Designers’. The predominantly browser-based design software makes it simpler than ever to design and prototype solutions in collaboration, making it the place ‘where teams design together.’ The ability to work together and see changes in real-time can save teams vast amounts of time.
No discussion of software that facilitates remote work can be had without a mention of Slack and Microsoft’s venture into the space, Teams. These are work-focused chat apps that allow users to easily talk and share files with each other.
These apps have changed the way many of us collaborate online. Thankfully, they’ve reduced the amount of time we need to spend in email by bringing chat functionality to the workplace.
On these apps you can create channels for specific topics, share access to documents and files, and have your water-cooler type conversations — all in app. They both boast a slew of integrations, streamlining otherwise tedious tasks.
Printing out, signing documents, scanning them, and sending them to whoever needs them, are examples of administration tasks that should be relegated to the history books. Fortunately, platforms like Hellosign are making that a reality. Hellosign allows users to electronically request and add legally valid signatures to any document seamlessly. It has a number of integrations with platforms like Salesforce, Google Docs and Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, and Oracle CPQ.
Many digital businesses have up to dozens of separate web apps they use to manage their day-to-day operations. Life would be a lot easier if these apps could share information with each other. This is what Zapier was created to do.
Zapier empowers users to integrate a vast number of platforms together and automate workflows. Be it creating a new card in Trello when you get a customer service email, or trigger updates in your CRM when you get an email, Zapier has you covered with its list of over 2000 apps to connect together.
A list like this wouldn’t be complete without a mention of some of the project management platforms available. Digital collaboration would simply be next to impossible (or head-ache inducing) without some of these apps.
Trello came onto the scene and provided the world with digital Kanban boards. This visual means of project planning can help reduce a lot of the complexity that comes with project management, and is ideal for teams using agile practices. One of the benefits of Trello is that it integrates with a large number of other platforms, making it easier to automate workflows.
Notion is a new player on the field and one that has generated more hype than most. The company describes itself as an all-in-one workspace. And if you’re dedicated, it really can be.
You can think of it as an amalgamation of your favourite productivity tools. Each component is like a Lego block you can combine to satisfy nearly any function you need. From Kanban boards, to-do lists, file storage, and databases, Notion provides just about everything you need in one place to get your organisation ordered, all in one place.
Here are just of the use-cases:
You really are limited by your imagination with Notion.
The amount of freedom it provides can be paralysing at first, but thankfully, there are plenty of templates you can use to kick off your productivity journey.
Asana is a well-known, sleek, project management platform that has helped some of the world’s largest organisations to get work done. It allows users to create projects and display them in a variety of forms (including Kanban boards, lists, and timelines), assign tasks and deadlines, and create custom workflows to automate repetitive tasks.
Monday is another widely popular project management app, used in 141 countries every day. It allows for the centralisation of all communication within the context of workflows and projects.
Teams use Monday to plan, manage, and track marketing activities, software development, sales, human resources — basically everything a digital organisation might need to do.
The platform can produce dashboards to help users get a more concrete understanding of what’s going on, timelines to track projects, track relative workload to see who in your team might have capacity and who might be overloaded, as well as the other standard things you’d expect in a project manager’s toolkit like Kanban board and calendar views.
These are just a fraction of some of the wonderful tools available to all of us to help us work more effectively and efficiently and focus on high-value tasks, rather than getting bogged down in tedious administration tasks.
If you’re looking for a project management platform or a new way of connecting your remote teams, it’s worth taking the time to explore what’s available. There’s a variety of offerings, all of which with their pros and cons. Find the one that fits your needs the best, as they will be instrumental in coordinating activities in your organisation.
