Let’s face it: even post-Covid pandemic, remote work is going to be the reality for many if not most of us. In their article, “Reimagining the office and work life after COVID-19”, McKinsey found that early this April, 62 percent of employed Americans worked at home during the crisis, compared with about 25 percent a couple of years ago. While there’s no replacing in-person engagement, today’s technology tools and platforms have transformed our ability to be productive in highly dispersed teams.
We at illume hire have pulled together our list of top tools you should be familiar with to maximize your productivity as a remote worker. We broke the list out by category.
Online Meetings
Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way: Zoom. While Zoom recently suffered an embarrassing outage, they remain the 800-lb gorilla in online meeting platforms, but Microsoft Teams is nipping at Zoom’s heals (maybe more like full-on biting), and Google is trying to keep pace with its Google Meet offering. Zoom offers a free version that’s limited to 40-minute meetings with a max of 100 attendees. Microsoft Teams and Google Meet also include free and paid versions rolled into Microsoft 365 and G Suite respectively.
Calendar and Scheduling
Look beyond the basics of Google Calendar or Outlook to get your time and meeting management game in tip-top shape. For those of us who struggle with the cat-herding exercise that is finding meeting times across team members, customers, and timezones, enter Doodle. Doodle excels at reducing time and endless email threads when trying to find a time that works for a meeting across multiple calendars. Using polls, Doodle enables you to offer slots and quickly zero in on the best option for your meeting invitees. Doodle has both free and paid versions and is a major time saver.
Another great app is Calendly, which flips the script on meeting scheduling, and allows your invites to find the best time based on timeslots that you designate. Calendly’s secret sauce lies in its rules that help you set up one-on-one, round-robin, and collective availability meetings.
Team Collaboration and Communication
If you aren’t familiar with Slack by now, it’s time to get acquainted with this top team collaboration platform. You’ll see Slack widely used on publicly accessible sites and within internal teams alike. Its simple concept is the ability to set up “Channels” which can focus on an entire project, or you can set up multiple channels for collaboration on different aspects of a more complex project. Slack has extensive points of integration with pretty much every tool out there, and using their bots enables you to automate everything from auto-responses for customer inquiries to triggering meetings based on a simple slack message.
Another great tool is Trello, from productivity powerhouse, Atlassian. Trello follows the kanban methodology, using the simple concept of cards, lists, and boards to empower individuals and teams to manage everything from the simple to more complex projects. It has a great mobile app, a desktop client, and a web interface.
Password Management
While managing passwords may not be top-of-mind when you think about productivity in a remote work environment, it should be. With all the different tools you’re using, and with an increased need to have highly secure passwords (which typically means longer, less predictable passwords), having a great password manager can save you a lot of time and headache when you can’t remember your login for a specific tool or service.
Our favorite password manager is LastPass. Like most services, it offers a free and paid version. The free version gives you a great, basic password management tool, and the paid version at just $3 per month allows you to manage more complex multi-factor authentication scenarios.
Note Taking
While we each have our own approach to note-taking, from sticky notes to napkins to Word documents, there’s one tool that rises to the top for us: Evernote. Evernote is the elder statesman of note-taking apps, but don’t let that long history fool you: this is a power-packed app. Beyond what you’d expect in terms of creating notebooks, adding tags for easy filtering, and syncing across all your devices, Evernote has excellent integration with a variety of tools like Gmail, browsers for web clipping, and both Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Even if you don’t run out (virtually of course) and sign up for any of these offerings, we recommend you check them out to make sure you’re familiar with them and ready to talk about how they could fit in remote teams’ lives during your next interview. Most of the services we mentioned above have thorough tutorials on their sites and we always recommend you check out YouTube where there is well-produced, free content to help you get started with each service.
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Nick is a serial entrepreneur with deep product and operational experience built through leadership roles across multiple Fortune 500 companies and startups, including a successful exit to Microsoft for BlueStripe Software where Nick was the VP of Product.
