Do you work remotely? If yes, what is your organization's communication stack?
Over the past year or so, remote.tools has been working remotely. Given it was the first time any of us were working remotely, we had to experiment a lot to choose the right set of tools. We ultimately decided upon 5 tools for different use-cases after using 18 tools.
Sharing the different tools and the use-cases below:
Tool : G-Suite (Gmail, Google Doc)
Use-case : Used for email communication and to take meeting notes & collaborate over calls
Tool : Zoom
Use-case : To have one-on-one calls with individuals and record meetings in case it involves an important strategic conversation
Tool : Remo.co
Use-case : For group video calling. This is primarily used for all-hands meetings for a particular team and to dissipate information to everyone in a fun, interactive manner
Tool : Slack
Use-case : Primarily for asynchronous communication and to share notes along with using handy add-ons such as Standuply, Bunch.ai
Tool : Notion.so
Use-case : To collaborate together and to share important lists/ docs/ and multiple other use-cases.
Apart from these, we have regular sync-up times for different kind of discussions - operational/ strategic depending upon their nature so the whole team is ready to use the right set of tools needed
Questions to community -
- What tools do you use as a remote team to communicate effectively with each other?
- Is there any alternative you could suggest to using Slack? We are exploring Microsoft Teams as the product has improved a lot over the past year or so.
We have a small team (three full-time and a couple freelancers) and based on about a decade of personal experience working remotely, I decided to keep it extremely simple. Too many tools can actually hinder great communication.
We triage communication: does it need done now, in an hour, or can it wait a day?
Probably 70% of our communication is email. Another 15% each would be chats and phone calls.
This sounds so simple yet so effective! Not only the concept but the implementation also seems to work.
Given 70% communication is over email, it suggests that the team primarily functions independently on many operational aspects. Do you think this is the case?
Also, was this ratio something you set out to achieve?
The ratio wasn’t something we set out to achieve, I think it’s just what happened naturally.
And yes, there is a high degree of independence and flexibility within our company. I think that’s essential for a remote team to be successful in the long run. Each member must be self driven - not really room for micromanagement in a healthy distributed team!
This is great! I think hiring becomes an even more important factor here. Is there anything specific you keep in mind while hiring and onboarding freelancers?
Hiring is very important! We hire freelancers on a project basis so there is relatively little communication there that needs to be planned. For full-timers, however, it’s essential that they’re driven and able to be self directed and independent. Which is hard to find.
Awesome! Gives me a lot of direction. The distribution stat also helps a lot. Would be great to know what the distribution looks like (assuming they too use different channels) for larger teams.
Also, just curious to understand if the freelancers you have hired are developers?
Streak looks great, Tony! Congratulations.
I have shared it with the team and will definitely wait for the Slack integration to try it out :)
I think it would do well on remote.tools too. Might help you get a few more eyeballs to the product.
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Awesome! Let me know what you think of the product
This comment was deleted 7 years ago