Top 5 Must-Have Tools for Working Remotely with Your Team

I sincerely hope you are taking care of yourself and your teams as we all face the looming danger of the Coronavirus. This is a frightening time for us all as we are concerned about the health of ourselves, our families, and our friends. And we are also concerned about our businesses.

If you are new to trying to manage a team online, it can be a bit of a challenge. But there are many amazing tools for working remotely out there that make it not only possible, but also incredibly efficient. Here is a shortlist of some of my favorite options.

Project Management

Who’s working on what? Who’s responsible for what? Lack of coordination can lead to losing hours of work and be an unnecessary drain on the finances. But if you use a project management tool, you can make sure that the right people are doing the right things at the right time. I have a couple of favorites.

Asana

Asana is a great project management tool. I love the way you can easily assign tasks to individuals on the team. When their work is ready for review, they simply reply to the task and tag you. When a task is done, just make it “complete”. It is wonderful for both small, simple tasks and more complex, many-layered projects.

Trello

Trello is another great one. I love the focus on drag-and-drop moveable cards. Members can be added to cards for assignments. If you have related documents stored in someplace like Dropbox or Google Drive, you can connect files or even entire folders. And if there is a project that you want to keep an eye on, you can “watch” it and get notifications as it is updated.

File sharing

If you need to collaborate, you will want to be able to share documents easily. All of the following options are great ways to share your work with others in the cloud. I’ll highlight the key differences.

Dropbox

The biggest benefit to Dropbox is how fast it can synch files. Because it only saves the sections of the file that is being changed during synching (rather than downloading and uploading the entire document), changes appear faster than with the others. This can be a great benefit when you have two or more people working on the same document at the same time.

Google Drive

With Google Drive, you start with a lot of free space. So for those who don’t want to spend a lot of money upfront, this is a great option. It is also highly compatible with rest of the Google ecosystem, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Sheets.

OneDrive

If you are a fan of Microsoft, this may be the way to go for you. Access to OneDrive comes with a yearly subscription to Microsoft Office. If you need a little extra security, OneDrive comes with Personal Vault, an option to add an extra layer of authentication to access select files.

Chat

You will definitely need to be able to communicate with your team. If you have a Facebook account, then you can easily set up a group chat in Facebook Messenger for your team members (assuming they also have a Facebook account). And if you want an independent option, you may want to look into Slack.

Video Conferencing

Your team doesn’t have to all be together to meet “face-to-face.” Zoom is a popular choice for businesses. GoToMeeting is another. And Skype is a favorite with the Microsoft fans.

Screen Capture

One of the difficulties communicating with online team members is that it can be a lot of (time-consuming) typing. It’s a lot easier and faster to say something than to type it out. This is where Loom screen capture comes in.

It’s especially helpful when you need to show someone how to do something. Just hit record to capture your screen, then narrate while you show them what to do, and then save your work. Send it in an email or message as a link. And, if they forget how to do something, they can always go back to the video.

Please Take Care of Yourself

I just want to say one more time before we finish here, please take care of yourself, your family, and your team members. We’re going to get through this. Meanwhile, take advantage of these tools for working remotely and keep everyone safe.