5 Useful Remote Work Tools During COVID-19

Being forced to collectively stay inside for the next few weeks, offers the ultimate opportunity to put your digital organization to a test. Remote work tools have gained momentum like never seen before in the last couple of days, though it might have felt a bit forced to some.

Whether you are used to staying in contact with your colleagues online, or have never worked a day remotely in your life, these 5 remote work tools will keep you and your organization going like nothing has changed at all.

Brainstorm away with Mural 

In times of crisis, we tend to go into operational mode, dealing with issues that arise day to day, rather than keeping our focus on the future. While these need the right amount of attention, it is important to keep looking a few steps ahead.

That’s why, when working remotely, things like brainstorms shouldn’t be put off until you get to meet in person again.

Mural is a great tool to keep your team strategically and creatively engaged, even when working in different timezones. As a cloud-based tool, the boards can be accessed from anywhere at any time.

Mural allows you to set up different boards that help you and your team with structuring and visualizing your ideas in post-its, schemes and drawings.

For example, you could organize a brainstorm session about delighting your customers in times of crisis.

Get your priorities straight with Husky Marketing Planner

Husky Marketing Planner allows you and your team to organize your to-do lists by planning them out on boards. You can assign owners to different projects and tasks, keep track of progress and rank them by priority. It is an easy tool to help facilitate your meetings and follow up afterwards.

By planning your team’s tasks out in this tool, you have a good oversight over timelines and workload for your team. It’s agile-proof, visually pleasant and lets you oversee the bigger picture.

Looking for other options? You might want to check out Trello, JIRA, Asana, Monday or Basecamp.

Spreadsheet enthousiasts, unite!

Are you the type of person that loves nothing more than a neatly organized spreadsheet? Airtable has got you covered. 

Some of its features are: 

• It allows you to add just about any type of content to your spreadsheets.
• It has different types of views according to what type of overview you need
• Smart relationships: you can link content to each other, which avoids double content
• Bonus: there’s a free version

Missing each other yet?

Craving personal contact? Haven’t seen your colleagues in a while? When you have a tight team that is used to working together in person often, it won’t be long until they are in need of some familiar faces while working from home.

There are plenty video calling apps to choose from with similar features. Which one you use, will largely depend on which apps you use for other daily communication with your team.

Our team prefers MS Teams, because it is an easy tool to chat, share documents and plan meetings. However, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype for Business and others do the trick too.

Do you have to do a webinar or conference call with quite some people? Intermedia Anymeeting is paid tool that allows you to add up to 50 people to your call, internal and external parties alike. Like most tools, they offer a 30 day free trial to find out if this tool suits your organization’s needs. Need extra options? Check out GoToWebinar, WebinarNinja, GetResponse, Zoom or WebEx.

Apart from webinars, there are different strategies you can use to stay relevant in these difficult times. Take a look at our 5 crisis communication strategies to get you started.

An ode to Google G Suite 

Sometimes it’s ok not to go looking too far. Google G Suite features Google’s widely used products; Gmail, Drive, Documents, Calendar,… all in one place. Choose per document or file whom inside and outside your organization you share them with and which rights they get, without any hassle.

It is one way to work together in files, without having to send updated version back and forth.

Overwhelmed by all the tools out there?

We get it, if we would have to list them all, the end wouldn’t be in sight for a while. Finding the right tools for your remote team’s needs might take some trial and error before you get it right.

A few things you could consider when choosing a remote work tool:

• Do you want a tool that offers “a bit of everything” or specialty tools for different types of tasks you would like to tackle?
• To which extent do you need visualization of your data and ideas?
• Should it be easy to access by people outside your organization?
• The safety guaranteed for your data.