RemoteFocusedTools

People who are a part of a remote team in a co-working space
For Employers ● Management ● RemoteFocusedTools

Best Tools for Managing a Remote Team

When deciding which tools to use with remote workers, think about the projects that you’ll need your remote team to complete, as well as how you want them to interact with your local team. You’ll want to choose tools that allow your teams to work efficiently and effectively. Since your organization will have a unique… View Article

When deciding which tools to use with remote workers, think about the projects that you’ll need your remote team to complete, as well as how you want them to interact with your local team. You’ll want to choose tools that allow your teams to work efficiently and effectively. Since your organization will have a unique set of needs, you’ll have to carefully consider each option against your objectives to make sure that you’re on the right path.

Having said that, here are a few tools that we think your organization could benefit from if you work in remote setups:

1. When it comes to project management….

We, at Turing, use Trello for project management. It’s a great (free) way to plan your projects, distribute tasks and collaborate together. Asana is another project management tool that is both easy-to-use and a very effective way to plot and track projects. Even industry giants like Uber, AirBnB and Pinterest use Asana.

While these tools aren’t the most versatile, their pros well outweigh the cons and they are a great way to keep your remote workers on track and on schedule.

2. When it comes to communication…

At Turing, we use Slack for most of our internal communication. Slack is an online chatroom that works as a great platform for brainstorming, sharing files, comparing notes and much more. Slack organizes your conversations by channels, keeping things neat and clean.

3. Video is critical…

As for video interactions, we principally use Zoom for our all hands meetings, and Whereby for quicker small team conversations or sales call. There are pros and cons for each of these, but choosing the best tool for your team depends on your company’s specific communication needs. 

4. Especially for creatives…

While Turing is focused on engineering driven tasks, that doesn’t mean there aren’t creative components to our work. Members of the marketing and commucations team here have recently been exploring Milanote.

Key Features of Milanote:
– Write notes & to-do lists, upload images & files and save things you find on the web
– Organize visually using the flexible drag and drop interface
– Boards by default are a private place to think, but with a single click you can create a shared workspace for collaboration with your team
– Milanote is filled with hundreds of built-in templates to help you get started with a variety of different projects, from creating a mood board to writing that perfect creative brief

Pricing:
– Free version available with no time limit.
– PRO version $9.99 per month (monthly and annual plans)

Below, you can have a quick look at the Milanote interface. It’s pretty.

Milanote Interface
 
Remote team management is essential to today’s modern workplace and an integral piece of the puzzle. The tools mentioned in this article should give you a good starting point when it comes to filling out your software stack and ensuring that you have all your communication bases covered.

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By ● Apr 30, 2020
Smart Slack hacks ultimate guide
COVID-19 ● For Employers ● Hacks ● Pro Tips ● Remote First How-to ● Remote Now ● RemoteFocusedTools ● Suddenly Remote

The Ultimate Guide to Slack Hacks

Slack is one of the most popular communication tools for remote teams. With the ability to coordinate conversations by a specific theme, within a team or company-wide, there is great power in this platform. Long popular with remote teams, here are some tips and tricks that you might have missed. Use these to make the most of your time and communication efforts.

Slack is one of the most popular communication tools for remote teams. With the ability to coordinate conversations by a specific theme, within a team or company-wide, there is great power in this platform.

Long popular with remote teams, here are some tips and tricks that you might have missed.

Use these to make the most of your time and communication efforts.

We will cover:

Notification Management

Pin important messages

Keyboard shortcuts

Polls and surveys

Star items = quick list

Slackbot Reminders

Include posts

Keyword Notifications

Find mentions quickly

Search Smarter

Quick link to previous posts

Bookmark location in a channel

Formatting for Impact

Deep Work Time – DND

Customized Emojis

Integrate! Apps, bots, and workflows

Notification Management

Pin important messages

    • You might want to pin the most current update of the project you are working on or your guide to using the channel. You can pin up to 100 messages per channel, but keeping it to crucial information is better.

Keyboard shortcuts

    • You can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate around the Workspace, mark a message as read or unread, format your messages, and more. Saving time and giving flow and process to your time in Slack.
    • When all the pictures and GIFs are making it hard to follow the conversation type “/collapse” into your text box, which will leave text only within the chat and reverse this type “/expand.”
    • To see the list of shortcuts hit “ctrl” and “/.”

Notification Management

    • You may not need notifications for all activity within a channel. Adjust your notification requirements by selecting the settings icon (cog) at the top of the channel on desktop or using the drop-down menu (3 dots) on mobile, then settings, then notifications/notification preferences.

Polls and surveys

    • Want to get some quick feedback from the team? Or trying to decide on meeting times? Use the command “/poll” and follow the instructions to call up the “Polly” app. Both powerful and fun.

Star items = quick list

    • Click “Show starred items” or use the keyboard shortcut “crtl_shift+s” for a quick list of all your starred messages. This hack can be useful to quickly review essential items and help you to come back to something you might not have time to handle at the moment.

Slackbot Reminders

    • Use the “/remind” command to give you a personal reminder, or to remind someone else on your team. An example is “/remind @Jeff of meeting at 2 pm”, your reminder will be sent at 2 pm to Jeff about your upcoming meeting.

Include posts

    • Where you need to share longer-form content, you can include posts in your Slack messages. You might want to share project plans, or quickly link to your code of conduct, vision, and mission statements.
    • Create a post – (On your desktop). Select the attachment icon (paperclip) → “Create new” → “Post.” From here, you can share your post, edit it, allow others to edit it, format the article, and add images to it—further instructions via the Slack help section. 

Keyword Notifications

    • While you will get notifications if you are tagged or mentioned, it can be useful to get a notification. Likewise, when someone uses a specific keyword. Go to preferences, then notifications to set up your desired keywords. You will receive the notification, and the channel will display a badge.

Find mentions quickly

    • You can use the @ symbol on the top right on desktop to show, or hide, mentions if you are looking for a recent conversation (or you’re drowning in notifications). Or use the keyboard shortcut “ctrl” + ”shift” + ”m” to show and hide your mentions.

Search Smarter

    • Use modifiers that help you to search smarter. “From:user”, “in:channel”, “during:March”, or “has:emoji-code”, this one is particularly useful if you follow a specific process of emoji usage within your Workspace. You can find a complete list of search modifiers here.

Quick link to previous posts

    • Using the timestamp (time beside your name above a post), you can copy this as a link and paste into a new post, bringing old posts back into the conversation quickly.

Bookmark a location in a channel

    • Some channels require more attention from us than others, if you need to read everything in the channel then use “Alt+click” on the message where you are leaving the channel, it will mark all subsequent messages as unread. On mobile, this should be a long press/hold on the message.

Formatting for Impact

    • Need certain parts of a post to stand out? Then use formatting. E.g., using * either side of a word will embolden it i.e., *here* now becomes here. Or traditional keyboard shortcuts also work. You can also add formatting like inline code or block quotes, very useful to help faster communication of crucial information. More on formatting your messages from Slack.

Deep Work Time – DND

    • DND – You can type in “/dnd” into the text box and then set a time, or use the bell icon to the top left and select a time frame. Stopping you from receiving any sounds or notifications in the time frame you specify, and your co-workers will see a sleeping symbol beside your name.

Customized Emojis

    • Emojis can be useful to speed up communication within your team or to help strengthen branding and team identity. You can add the custom emojis from the drop-down menu on the top left and choose “Customize Slack.” Admins have the power to limit who can edit these.

Integrate! Apps, bots, and workflows

      • Slack supports integrations with 100s of apps. Here is a list of some of the most popular ones. See the Slack help center for details on each and a full list of apps available, or click here 
      • Zoom for Slack – Start a meeting, join a meeting and make a call with Zoom phone. Remember, you must register your Slack and Zoom accounts with the same email address.
      • Trello for Slack – Manage cards on your boards from Slack, add conversations to cards, and update due dates.
      • Asana for Slack – Create new tasks and turn your conversations in Slack into to-dos in Asana
      • Salesforce for Slack – Search Salesforce records from Slack, configure Salesforce alerts for Slack. Send Slack messages to Salesforce, or send Salesforce records to Slack.
      • Twitter for Slack – You can set up mentions on Twitter to feed into a channel that the team can keep an eye on. You can also follow similar businesses or your suppliers.
      • Google Calendar for Slack – View your full schedule and have your status update when you are scheduled in a meeting.
      • Donut for Slack – Donut helps to improve team-building; there are prebuilt connection programs in Donut, one of the most popular functions is virtual random coffees. This helps to encourage cross-organizational bonding.
      • Loom for Slack – Mention @person or #channel directly in your Loom videos, and they can watch the clip without needing to leave Slack.
      • Polly for Slack – This Polls and surveys bot lets you get quick feedback. You can also use pulse surveys directly in Slack.
      • Greetbot for Slack – An onboarding assistant for Slack. You can use this to customize welcome messages and schedule follow-ups.
      • You can also create custom integrations, build your bot, create automated workflows, and much more, read more on this via the Slack help center here.

 

Do you have a workflow or trick that works well for you in Slack? Then please share it with us over on Twitter @Turingcom.

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By ● Mar 31, 2020
Coronavirus tracked the latest figures as the outbreak spreads
COVID-19 ● Mental Health and Productivity ● Remote First How-to ● Remote Now ● RemoteFocusedTools ● Turing News

Remote Now! A primer for the “suddenly remote” during the COVID-19 pandemic

By now, you’ve almost certainly heard the news. As coronavirus cases explode around the globe, more and more companies are instructing their teams to work from home. For companies that already have a fully or partially remote structure, this is pretty much business as usual. But, if your employer is more traditional, being forced to run an entire business with a team that finds itself in the position of suddenly being remote presents a slew of challenges.

Introduction:

By now, you’ve almost certainly heard the news. As coronavirus cases explode around the globe, more and more companies are instructing their teams to work from home.

For companies that already have a fully or partially remote structure, this is pretty much business as usual. But, if your employer is more traditional, being forced to run an entire business with a team that finds itself in the position of suddenly being remote presents a slew of challenges.

This primer, which will be produced in short excerpts, is intended to help employees and employers get a grip on the essential skills, tools, and best practices that will reduce the problems and stress we’re all likely to encounter during this frightening time.

For most of us, this Remote-Now experience will (hopefully) be short-lived. If we’re fortunate, we’ll weather the coronavirus crisis quickly, and within a couple of weeks, people will be able to return to their offices and normal work schedules.

This primer is not intended to help your company “go remote” on a long term basis. Our goal is to give you the necessary knowledge and skills to enable you to continue your operations with as little disruption as possible during the near term.

As a result, we’re not going to do an exhaustive review of every tool, or of all the techniques that remote-first companies use. Instead, we’ll focus on simple practices and widely available and mostly free tools that will allow you to get started quickly and function at a reasonably high level during this difficult time.

Over the next several short posts, we’ll profile the tools we think are the easiest to learn, the most common (making it more likely your team is already familiar with them), and especially those that are inexpensive or free. We’ll talk about scheduling, give you a list of the most common remote worker shorthand, and go over the best practices we’ve found that will help your team interact in the most seamless manner possible.

To help you get started, here’s a short list courtesy of Lisette Sutherland of Collaboration Superpowers with the simple things your company and employees can do now to help make this daunting and unexpected challenge a bit easier:

  1. Find a dedicated place in your house. Make this an area where you can be productive and is separate from your private life. 
  2. Use video. It’s important that your team members can see and hear you well. Have plenty of light and wear a headset.
  3. Create a team agreement. Talk about expectations for how to work together—templates available here.
  4. Set goals and be enthusiastic. Working remote is all about trust and communication. How will you know what each other are doing? 
  5. Get familiar with the tools. There are great tools available for online collaboration like Zoom, Slack, and GoogleDocs that can make this process easier.
  6. Lean in. Start without big expectations, experiment, and grow your skills. Put feedback loops in place to evaluate progress. Regular retrospectives on how the team is doing will inspire continuous improvement and trust.

In addition, don’t forget to be empathetic. Not everyone has worked from home before. Some issues and distractions are likely to make this effort more challenging for some than others (kids home from school or a sick spouse come to mind). 

There’s a learning curve here. Going Remote on the fly is not the simplest thing in the world, especially when that world is freaking out around you. Put simply, be kind to one another. We’re all in this together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By ● Mar 13, 2020
A detailed chart of the various remote work tools distributed teams can use while going Boundaryless
Boundaryless Landscape ● For Employers ● RemoteFocusedTools

Why a Landscape of Remote-Work Tools is Better Than One “Super-App”

Why remote teams need an array of tools from which to choose instead of one all-encompassing app.

On November 22, Forbes published an article titled The Most Exciting Tech Trends For 2020, From Five Leading Investors Around The World.

One of the contributors was the highly-esteemed Sarah Smith, Investing Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. Her interesting take on tech trends pertained to remote teams changing how we interact and which tools we need for workforce productivity. To quote her:

“As more and more tech leaders are facing a talent shortage in the U.S., they are building teams remotely. As a result, many of them are starting companies to enable better experiences for remote teams focused on productivity and communication. There are a plethora of tools popping up aiming to be the next generation of Slack, Zoom, and note apps like Quip and Evernote.”

“I believe the way leaders, managers, teams, and all employees interact and work is changing quite rapidly, but it is not yet clear if one super-app will stitch together everything a remote team needs or if we’ll deploy even more apps than before. More importantly, I’m keen to find tools the create the trust, empathy, and companionship that inherently comes with in-person interactions which are mostly lost in a fully remote working world.”

Sarah’s thought of one super-app that stitches it all together is an intriguing one, and I tried imagining such a tool for a moment. (I also imagined the glitches in its first release!)

But then I started thinking of the benefits to the current array of remote-work tools available. Three come to mind.

More tools enable more/better features. First, no matter how super a super-app would be, it’s unimaginable that it could provide all the features and uses provided by the current remote-enabling tools listed in the Boundaryless landscape (above). 

More tools satisfy diverse teams. Second, the multitude of apps on the market reflects the beautiful diversity that remote work makes possible. One of the most significant benefits of remote work is that it enables companies – even the littlest ones – to employ incredibly diverse teams of professionals from around the globe. Diverse teams need to experiment with an array of tools. It’s unlikely any single app, no matter how tremendous, can satisfy the unique requirements of every organization.

An entire landscape of tools promotes innovation. 

Image showing the landscape of tools and companies in the remote-distributed-teams ecosystem

At Turing, we believe that innovation is an inherent good. It pushes humanity forward by promoting competition and a cycle of continuous improvement. To support this cycle as well as the ecosystem of #Boundaryless companies, we’ll continue to update the landscape whenever we learn about new companies that are helping to push the state of remote, distributed teams forward.

You can click here to read more about a few remote tools that we think your organization could benefit from if you work in remote setups.

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By ● Dec 10, 2019