Let’s get one thing straight from the get go: we LOVE working remotely. But we’ve said it time and time again: it’s not a completely rosy situation. There are challenges to making sure your remote team stays happy, productive, and effective. Our tech stack is one of the things that’s absolutely crucial to making our work possible. There are a few tools that we absolutely swear by, and if you’re looking to build a remote workforce, you should too!
Zoom
Being on your own is often the best way to achieve a deep work state, but let’s face it: sometimes you really need to meet “face to face” to keep things moving along. In the digital marketing world, face to face meetings are also important to talk through metrics, performance, and new strategies with clients.
For that purpose we use Zoom. Sure, Google Hangouts is free, but we’ve found that we often have connection problems with Google Hangouts locally, while we don’t have those issues with Zoom. However: during international travel, sometimes Google Hangouts can be more stable due to the prevalence of their servers abroad. Either way, a robust and effective video conferencing system is crucial for a remote business. Experiment and see which works best for your situation!
Asana
Asana is key for us to stay organized, on top of our tasks, and to ensure transparency with clients. We have individual projects for each client, and they have access to their respective asana projects. That means they can see us complete work in real time, and we can ask questions about specific tasks with relevant information built right into where we’re having that discussion.
Google Drive
The home of all of our documents! We keep all of our training docs, past blog posts, past reports, and client creative in Google Drive. These files are available to whomever needs them within our organization. That also means if something happens to an individual computer, we don’t potentially lose weeks or months of work.
We also give clients access to our Google drive folders for work we’re doing for them. This helps keep file transfers tidy and permanent.
Slack
For everything else: there’s Slack. Not only is it an important place where work gets done, it’s also a place for our team to bond and our relationships together to grow. Slack is surely an integral part of physical office life these days, and it’s even more important to a remote business, where conversations often take place asynchronously.
