To successfully work remotely these days, you need to possess more than mere self-motivation and a good Wi-Fi connection. Distributed teams depend on a ton of digital tools for productive collaboration, but in the face of increasing software sprawl, they need to be more selective. Aside from keeping subscriptions costs in check, choosing remote tools wisely reduces the risk of creating information silos and effort duplications across your business.
Given that on average managers can't remember 60% of what their teams are working on, remote collaboration tools also serve a more fundamental function for team cohesion. As more companies embrace hybrid working, collaboration and team culture needs to adopt a remote first company culture outlook. Here’s our selection of indispensable remote collaboration tools to keep everyone connected and supported
Slack
Used by millions of people every day, Slack is one of the most popular apps for remote team communication. It takes an instant messenger approach to communication, helping people feel involved no matter where they’re located. While it can get disruptively synchronous if used for everything, Slack is perfect for quick everyday syncing—like short team announcements, updates, quick requests and sharing inspiration. If you’re looking for a tool to help work feel more streamlined, Slack ticks that box too: you can use it to keep all work communication, contacts and tasks in one place, create specific channels for certain projects, and chat publicly, in groups or privately.
Basecamp
Think of Basecamp as an asynchronous communication hub for remote teams, where you can link important company docs and create rich project posts, as well as assign to-do tasks to different teams or individuals. When everyone’s working remotely it can be tricky to gauge progress and how people are getting on, but Basecamp helps keep you on track. Work is broken into separate projects, and each project contains everything related to the task—who’s working on it, every chat you’ve had, every file that’s been uploaded, every upcoming deadline. You can also set automated recurring prompts to your entire group, which are particularly good for getting social company discussions going.
Timely
Time tracking is important for business, and for many remote teams it’s an essential means for keeping team work and workloads visible. Thankfully, by automatically capturing everything you work on for you, Timely can reduce time reporting by 75% and provide remote workers with a detailed, objective view of their day. This enables teams to manage their capacity—planning projects and individual schedules according to the time and resource they actually need. It also ensures all team work stays visible and lets remote colleagues stay updated on task progress without interrupting one another. Perhaps most importantly, it's essential for ensuring everyone keeps a healthy work/life balance by seeing exactly how many hours they put in each day.
Airtable
Airtable is a highly customizable tool for detail-oriented remote teams who like to stay organized as they collaborate. Perfect for centralizing and indexing tasks, here at Memory we use it to collect and prioritize feature pitches for our products. Part spreadsheet, part database, you can use Airtable to organize your work however you want – whether it’s to plan editorial calendars or project management. Because changes are instantly synced across all devices, remote collaboration, storage and organization has never been easier.
Google Docs
Google Docs is probably the best-known free tool for collaborative work, particularly content. It’s incredibly easy to share, edit and publish all kinds of documents, as well as knock up presentations and spreadsheets. Because all users can mark their edits as suggestions, Google Docs is especially useful if you have lots of different people working on the same file at once. There’s no worrying about edits being lost or people overwriting each other: the file owner can see all suggested edits and simply choose which to accept. Another plus is you don’t need an internet connection to use it, meaning Google Docs is perfect for when individuals work on the move and want to save their work.
Box
Seamless remote knowledge and file sharing is essential to remote teams. If you’re looking to simplify the ways your team works, check out Box, a single platform for secure content management, workflow and collaboration. It creates a protected workspace where multiple teams can securely edit, share, comment on, and assign work – quashing the security risks that can come with accessing content from a host of different places. What’s more, its handy collaborative note-taking tool makes it easy for people to swap ideas and see developments as they occur in real time – essential for keeping everyone on the same page.
Figma
For design work, you can’t beat Figma, where everyone can collaboratively edit and design in real time from one place. When it comes to staying updated, quickly seeing what different contributors are up to and how projects are looking, Figma’s capabilities are second to none. It allows you to work faster and smarter, give all design work the required visibility between teams, and get everyone on the same page. Also, because it’s built for browsers, you can use Figma across any platform. Easy.
Tuple
For pair programmers who want more than a generic screen sharing tool, check out Tuple. This innovative new app gives mouse and keyboard control to both parties, and because you can start pairing in just one click, there’s no need for collaboration to be delayed even for a second. The handy screen annotation feature means you can highlight or draw directly on your pair's screen when navigating, and with crisp audio and 5K visual quality, no detail gets lost. All of this is achieved with a staggeringly low CPU cost to your machine and once you’re paired up, Tuple fades into the background so you to just focus on working together.
1Password
Working in remote teams often means sharing access to the same tools. The days when it was OK to manually store passwords on your computer are long gone, but keeping tabs of multiple different passwords and their respective updates – and then sharing them between different users – isn’t an easy job. Enter 1Password, a useful tool which not only remembers all your passwords for you, but also helps protect your data, strengthen your defenses, and encourage your workers to make smarter security decisions.
