COVID-19: Keep productive with the 6 ultimate tools for remote work

Suddenly, your whole operation had to move into a remote scenario. As a manager or business owner, you may feel completely lost and unprepared to deal with it. When globally scaled issues like COVID-19 happen, we realize the importance of keeping a business going through challenging times.

However, staying productive online requires defining the right tools. Check below the main ones (even internally used by our team at Rocket.Chat) to help your team stay collaborative and efficient:

1. Asana: Intuitive task management

Asana is the easiest way to manage projects and tasks in a single place and improve accountability. Our teams at Rocket.Chat love the fact that it is incredibly flexible, allowing us to track progress for both ongoing work and long-term projects. They also have a wide range of integrations, which added to their clean, intuitive, and sleek interface that helps to monitor our projects.

Each team can have its own project, projects can have milestones, milestones have tasks and tasks can be prioritized, have their status update, have numerous sub-tasks, and it goes on. It is a great tool to distribute workloads across employees.

However, since the tool has numerous features it can be tricky to keep track of project progress. For this reason, we have created an internal user guide to guide our team on:

• How to prioritize the urgency of tasks
• Update the status of a task
• Connect a task with the overall company or team goals

To build this guide, an internal brainstorming activity was done and even though each team organizes differently, the whole company tries to follow the best practices of this guide.

Note that we don’t think creating a guide is a mandatory action for every company, especially if you have a small team that is just starting. Whereas, creating this guide really helped our teams to take the most advantage of Asana’s clean, intuitive, and sleek interface.

2. Rocket.Chat: Fast remote collaboration and communication

Rocket.Chat is a communication hub that is ideal for organizations that are looking to communicate fast, collaborate regardless of current location, require high-security standards and want to reduce the number of communication tools.

In case you are wondering, absolutely, we use Rocket.Chat in our daily routine. Not just because it is our product, but because we see it as the most advanced way to avoid wasting time with emails, focusing on fast communication. In fact, thanks to it we efficiently keep 45% of our team that lives outside Brazil collaborating remotely.

Check out some sneak peeks on how we use Rocket.Chat to accelerate our productivity

3. G Suite: File sharing made easy

The main advantage of G Suite is the ability to share information and documents, streamline processes, and increase your team’s productivity. Synchronizing and sharing data allow everyone to access documents and collaborate as if they were in the same office and time zone.

It also has excellent benefits on controlling data, since you can easily control who will see, edit or even be able to make any further changes to your documents.

4. Zapier: Save time with integrations

Maybe you never thought about automating tasks. In that case, we highly recommend you take a look at Zapier. There you will find loads of incredible integrations for apps of daily usage, aiming to automate your work in the easiest possible way.

The best thing about it is the fact that it offers thousands of apps you use every day to be set with automations that accomplish your routine tasks automatically. For instance, you could connect your Twitter account with your Rocket.Chat user and be notified of new Twitter mentions via private group messages on Rocket.Chat. Very handy, don’t you think?

As you can see, only Rocket.Chat counts for more than 2,000 integrations there. Now imagine you can find almost anything to be automated there since it is a really comprehensive platform. So make a list of all the tasks you’d need automated, and Zapier them up!

5. Zoho One: The ultimate all-in-one marketing platform

Zoho One gives you one suite of 35 web and 40 mobile apps to simplify and automate your entire business. The platform allows you to automate marketing processes, nurturing leads from your website or landing pages, track and schedule social media campaigns and even sell online and receive payments. Indeed, the wide variety of modules may sound a bit overwhelming in the first moment. Let’s focus on the apps that we consider indispensable in our daily routines: CRM, campaigns, social, people, HR, books, and desk. All of them make it easy to do a cross-team collaboration.

For example: when a customer opens a support ticket through Rocket.Chat’s live chat, the email informed is the same in his CRM profile and desk. Consequently, the live chat agent, while talking with the client can pull his entire data at once and be quickly informed on his case.

In the end, you get a platform that allows you to automate countless marketing and customer-related data actions saving you time (and possibly your headcount as well). If you are seeking a software to help you improve processes, sales and increase revenue, we highly recommend Zoho One.

6. Github: Collaborative and assertive coding

One of our favorite tools ever. Github is the leading platform to share and build better software. Our own software was entirely built through it.

If you ever worked on a code project, you know how important it is counting on a platform where you can safely test ideas, as well as improve the ones you are already certain to develop. GitHub not only offers lightweight code review tools that will increase the quality of your code, but it also fits neatly into your workflow. We particularly appreciate that if you want to start a new feature or propose changes, by pulling a request you coordinate details and refine your changes easily. In fact, it is one of the main tools that we use to adjust our own coding at Rocket.Chat.

Does your team use any of these tools yet?

We know changing means challenges for most companies. However, COVID-19 is already changing the way we work, travel and live. Adopting these tools could represent preventing your operation from being damaged by demanding times like these.

Feeling lost in how to transition your operation to online?

Rocket.Chat is committed to providing remote work best practices to its community.