orking remotely requires tools that help you focus, communicate with your colleagues (despite being physically distant), as well as keep your concentration and orientation on results and goals. Using the best platforms will make managing your work, your time, and your schedule much easier.
Communication, especially when working remotely, is a key point, but it is also a critical factor. Not all companies know how to communicate asynchronously, which is essential when information is exchanged between several people without immediate responses. Now, if we are moving towards more flexible working models, in which people increasingly work from different locations – often with different time zones – and have flexible hours, it is not difficult to understand the need to move towards this type of communication.
"What was once informal now has to be thought through. Having virtual leisure spaces without an appointment (like a virtual café), face-to-face monthly meetings, streamlining regular meetings with moments of connection, defining sync versus async communication policies, choosing a single remote communication platform, documenting information in a shared digital space that's relevant to the team… There are several options. It is important to think about them, involving the team in this definition", says Sara Midões, author of the study “The new normal: What are the biggest challenges for leaders in Portugal?”, a specialist in positive leadership and well-being at work and founder of Community, quoted by Pessoas by ECO.
In this study, the specialist in leadership and well-being actually concludes that the majority of Portuguese managers (66%) believe that reinventing new ways of communicating as a team will be the main challenge for leaders in the post-pandemic period.
To ensure that you are prepared for the most common working models nowadays, we put together a list of the seven tools that we consider most important and useful in async communication. The first five are the base-tools we use at Coverflex, so we inevitably had to name them first:
Slack
Text messages, voice messages. Calls with or without video. Private chats, group chats, file uploads. Slack is one of the best tools on the market for sync and async team communication, allowing integration with several other tools, such as Google Calendar, Zoom, Notion, Trello, among many others. To spice up your work, you can also add emojis to Slack, and share GIFs via the Giphy app integration.
The free version of Slack lets you integrate up to 10 apps, view message history up to 10K, and offers 5G storage.
Zoom
If you've used the internet in the last two years, you've probably heard of Zoom. With the possibility of making video or voice-only calls, Zoom has a number of options that can facilitate your meetings: screen sharing, integrated chat, the option to mute the microphone and/or turn off the camera, the option to "raise your hand" when you have something to say, among others. Zoom also allows you to add images as backgrounds to your screen and add filters, which is both useful and fun, depending on the occasion!
The free version of Zoom allows you to gather up to 100 people in a room, and each meeting can have up to 40 minutes.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a completely online, cloud-based project management tool. This platform is ideal for recording and tracking your team's projects, giving you the possibility to create tasks and subtasks, assign them to team members and set deadlines for each one, with the possibility to write notes and comments on each one of the tasks.
ClickUp's free plan is considered one of the best free plans among project management platforms, offering unlimited membership and tasks, collaborative documents and "Kanban boards" up to 100MB of storage. The free version of this platform also gives you access to 24/7 online support.
Notion
Documentation, documentation, documentation. With Notion you can create documents that can range from the simplest to the most complex, including plain text, lists, tables, calendars, among other types of documents, with the possibility of adding multimedia files, creating reminders and integrating team members, who can comment and/or edit at any time.
Notion's free plan gives you unlimited pages but only allows access to 5 guest accounts. For $10 dollars a month ($8 if paid annually), you get full access to Notion's collaborative space, which all your team members, no matter how many, can have access to.
Miro
Imagine a whiteboard, where you can draw, write, sketch… This is what Miro is! In addition to having the freedom to organise your work in the visual way that makes the most sense to you, with Miro you also have the possibility to share your boards with members of your team - and everyone can edit and/or leave comments, which allows you to work on the same project remotely and asynchronously.
With the free version of this platform, you can have up to three editable boards, pre-defined templates, and an unlimited number of people with access to them.
Loom
In what comes to instant messaging platforms and apps, Loom is one of the ideal platformsfor async communication. It allows you to record voice messages and videos, the main objective being that you don't have to wait for a free slot in the calendar to talk to someone. Loom works in voice or video format and there is less room for misinterpretations, which can happen when using only written messages.
The app has a free package, which allows the sharing of 100 videos and screenshots, in addition to recording videos of up to five minutes.
Twist
Also recommended for async communication, Twist has similar functionalities to Slack, allowing you to send messages and responses in threads through several channels. However, the main difference that makes this tool not suitable for real-time communication is that Twist prioritises completely focused work, removing distractions and the impact of notifications.
Twist has a free version that allows you to view conversation history (up to a month back) and has 5GB of storage.
Trello
Here's another tool to help you with team project management, and even personal organisation: Trello. The goal of this tool is to provide a “Kanban board”, with several columns – which you can customise – that help you to define the status of your tasks. In the simplest and predefined format, the statuses can be “Finished this week”, “In progress”, “Closed”, “Awesome ideas”, and so on.
Moving projects to the following columns, and thus seeing their status moving towards completed tasks, can act as a motivation and focus boost.
Google Drive
Well known and used by several companies and professionals, Google Drive continues to be a very useful tool for collaboration between colleagues and teams. Completely online, in the cloud, Drive is a storage space that can be used to store the work you do, as well as to create and edit documents together, which can be text documents, animated presentations or spreadsheets.
This tool, which is free, allows you to store files up to a total of 15GB.
Basecamp
In order to keep a closer communication with your clients, Basecamp has the upside of allowing you to share materials, as well as schedule remote meetings or activate alert notifications whenever you want. The main advantage is that this tool brings together all those involved in a given topic in a single place, facilitating and improving decision-making.
There is a free version of the tool that limits use to three projects, 20 users and 1GB of file storage space. To extend the plan, you must subscribe to a paid package subscription.
Pipefy
Pipefy is the place where you can centralise everything from accounts payable or receivable to the hiring pipeline and expense reimbursements or purchase requests. Most processes take place in this tool, which gives you the autonomy to quickly implement new workflows and constantly improve deliveries.
It's a low-code and no-code platform that gives anyone the power to automate workflows and manage work processes without the need for programming knowledge.
DocuSign
Waiting to gather all the parties that are necessary for the signing of a contract or any other important paper that requires a signature is not feasible. So, to speed up this process, DocuSign allows you to digitally sign documents in a safe and simple way.
Used by one million customers, including Unilever, Deloitte, Salesforce and Santander, this tool offers a myriad of products and solutions.
