Since remote workers don't see each other face to face, the need for tools to let them communicate as if they're face to face is important. With the advent of the Internet, this is possible.
Here's a list of the best communication tools for remote workers.
Slack
Slack is one of the most business communication software made in recent years. Ut's cross-platform and has a web version. People can chat, hold teleconferences, and add emojis to their messages.
They can also chat in groups via different channels or create chats with several people. Data can be shared via file upload and links which can be previewed inside Slack.
Zoom
Zoom is a teleconferencing platform that lets people join audio and video chats. It also has a text chat box as a supplementary feature. It also supports chatting via the phone.
The user base of Zoom is growing rapidly, with 30000 users in 2014 to 200000 in 2017.
The satisfaction of Zoom is higher than the other competitors like Google Meet or Skype.
InVision
InVision is great for sharing graphic designs in a team, which is useful for many industries like software development, publishing, etc. It lets us inspect the designs in detail like displaying the CSS styles of each part of the design, which is handy for software developers.
Other features including getting colors and rapid prototyping by creating designs that simulate what the finished product would do.
It also has a whiteboard called InVision Freehand that lets us add wireframes, plan, and design presentations.
GitHub
GitHub is a platform that lets us host software code in a remote server via Git. Git is a distributed version control software that lets people pull code from remote servers into their own computer, work on it, and then push the code back onto the servers.
Then they can open pull requests to let people review their code and comment on their changes.
It cares about security. There're many options to secure private repositories via tokens and encryption keys.
Trello
Trello is a simple project management software that displays project task statuses on a board that's divided by status.
It doesn't take much effort to manage the simple board, and people can comment on tasks on the board. This lets people communicate about tasks without having too much overhead. Therefore, it's great for fast-paced companies like startups.
Conclusion
For remote workers, online collaboration tools are very important. Fortunately, many companies have hopped onto the bandwagon to come up with solutions that solve many remote teams' problems.
With these tools, remote workers can work just as productively as onsite workers, at least for office jobs.
Top comments (3)
The article is great, but I think that this tools are more for tech company in general instead of remote ones. I've been in 3 companies without remote working and they all use this tools or similars ^
Thanks for reading.
Yea. Any team can use these tools. But the ones that need it the most are the remote ones. They can't live without them.
Onsite teams can also go back to talking in person and printouts for designs.
Thank you John for sharing your point of view with us. We use GitHub, Trello or JIRA depends on project, too. In addition to this, our company uses tmetric.com/ tracker to log time spending on tasks. It's convenient and improve our productivity. I think such apps can motivate somehow because you can see your productivity during the day via diagram and realize how improve working process. Also, team manager can see reports about whole team, and based on this, change the project management approach if needed.