Have you been asked to suddenly work from home?
For many of us, that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. But finding yourself with the same projects and responsibilities, only sans team, can make maintaining your momentum harder than you think.
Organizing your virtual workspace is the best way to start. You can think of monday.com as your Work OS, housing all of your company’s workflows, projects, and communication. But like any OS, there are other collaboration tools, that, in addition to monday.com, can really help you work remotely, better.
We’ve put together our 5 must-have programs that can get you performing as usual, right away. They will help ensure you don’t lose any of the value you’re accustomed to getting from your team (but you can still wear your pajamas—no one will know).
Before installing anything, align on communication
Getting everyone on the same page while in an office is hard enough. But when you can’t quickly schedule an in-person sync, staying aligned is a much larger challenge.
It’s important to establish guidelines for how to communicate and what updates you’ll share with the team.
How to communicate
To make sure information isn’t lost, establish a regular cadence of updates— whether it’s a quick morning call to sync or a shared space to log updates. It’s important to find something that can integrate into your schedule easily and works for everyone on your team.
What to communicate
If you’re a manager, you can let everyone on your team know that you would like a summary of the progress from the day before, with goals for the upcoming day. As an employee, it will be helpful to gather questions or outstanding items that can be handled while everyone is together on the call.
Setting expectations for the kind of information you should have prepared will help you fully maximize the limited time you have together to focus on the value you can provide to one another.
Once you have defined how you would like your remote workflow to look and the unique priorities for your team, it’s time to evaluate the tools that can make those things happen. We put together a tech stack that will help your remote team function at full capacity, no matter where you’re are working from, and defined the value each one serves.
Your remote-ready tools:
Zoom
Unplanned collaborative moments
Face-to-face communication has undeniable value — and when you’re working remotely, this can be a real challenge. Zoom, a videoconferencing platform, allows you to replicate the unexpected breakthroughs and collaborative moments that can happen when you’re in a problem-solving meeting. It’s easy to get started with a free trial and can grow with the size of your team.
P.S: monday.com has a new integration with Zoom which allows you to easily keep record of the progress from each call and seamlessly add it into your team’s workflow! You can read all about our Zoom integration here.
Slack
Synthesized chit-chat (it’s more important than you would think)
Remote work means no swiveling your chair around to ask a quick question. Slack, a messaging platform, lets you have instant dialogue with people on your team, perfect for the small questions and feedback that shouldn’t take more than seconds. Those minutes saved by quickly syncing, sharing ideas, and getting instant answers can really add up in a remote work environment.
And if you want to bring your remote connectivity to an all-time high… you can check our monday.com’s integration with Slack! We have a few automations that make sure your team stays in the know all the time, such as:
- When date arrives, notify in channel
- When item is created, notify in channel
- When a status changes to something, notify in channel
- When a column changes, notify in channel
- When an update is posted in this item, send it to channel
- When any update is posted, send it to channel
Check out more about our Slack integration here.
G Suite
Personal productivity from anywhere
Having your team distributed can increase the possibility of double-work and wasted resources. Avoid working on the wrong version of a document or presentation by utilizing Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and more. By sharing one document with everyone involved, you can always be sure you’re looking at the most up to date version.
And… you guessed it! monday.com integrates with G Suite! Uploading documents from within your Google Drive is just two clicks away. Documents, presentations, or sheets can be added to comments or status and will all be saved within your monday.com files.
Learn more about our G Suite integration here!
Box
Secured files for every distributed team
Box allows you to share files, collaborate on documents, automate processes and more—giving you peace of mind that everything you do is secure over their network. The security of your team’s documents should be a priority, no matter where you are.
With monday.com’s Box integration you can easily upload files and collaborate in context over the monday.com platform.
eventbrite
Event execution, anytime and anywhere
Whether you’re planning a conference, meetup, or company party, eventbrite helps you plan logistics, create landing pages, understand analytics and more. Online events help you spread your reach internationally and connect your community easily. eventbrite can take you from, “you can have that event online?’ to sending e-vites in no time. Check out their guide on how to put on online events here.
Events involve almost every team in the company, so keeping everyone up to date is even more important when working remotely. Integrate your eventbrite account with monday.com to make your plans transparent to everyone in the company.
Remote work has its own unique challenges, especially when it comes unexpectedly. But with the right tech stack and goals in mind, your team can easily continue working together and achieving your goals, no matter where you are.
