Remote work is a rapidly-growing trend. According to News Corp Australia, over 500,000 Australians are considered to be digital nomads. This number is based on the extrapolated average of the USA and UK figures that are 4.8 and 2 million respectively. International Workplace Group also reports that nearly 50% of Australians work remotely for at least 4 days a week.
It’s hard to oppose the prediction that the number is going to rise as remote workers are cheaper and tend to be more productive. ToBeProductive.com has gathered the best apps that help remote workers.
Slack – Textual Communication
Slack proved to be one of the best apps for cross-platform communication of remote teams. Market leaders of remote collaboration, such as Zapier and Buffer, use Slack as their virtual meeting space. It allows employees to reply to each other immediately, both individually and in public threads.
Slack allows you to create as many topic threads as you need to discuss questions with specific personalities. You’re allowed to make special channels for customers as well. Customisable bots and over a thousand third-party service integrations can help you to accomplish a wide range of tasks.
This app is available for both iOS and Android smartphones as a free compliment to the main company subscription. It means that you don’t have to push employees to use the same OS and purchase corporate devices.
Google Docs – Collaboration On Documents
Word processing apps are essential for any business. While the classic Microsoft Word is a pricey solution for teams that need an advanced text-editing kit, Google Docs comes in handy for the basics.
This app allows your team to create, edit, and exchange documents in DOCX, RTF, PDF, HTML, and other major formats. It allows you to change fonts, colors, styles, sizes, and to insert images directly from the integrated web access.
Google Drive is integrated into the app for background backuping of data. It’s impossible to lose a document as every new symbol is saved immediately. You can also benefit from the simultaneous collaboration of up to 10 users per document. Files are also available for simultaneous viewing from 200 devices.
Trello – Project Management
This tool for project management is based on the Kanban system that was developed and popularised by Japanese car manufacturer Toyota. They still use it to control the workflow. You can create boards with lists of tasks.
You can easily assign deadlines and create interactive to-do lists to deliver your plans in a fast-paced format. Users can comment on tasks to suggest better ways to accomplish them. In 2018 Trello had over 1.5 million daily users. We use Trello at ToBeProductive.com to get all collaboration-related emails converted into to-do lists automatically, as well as to track the progress of all tasks.
Zoom – Video Conferences
This app allows you to host 40-minute video conferences for up to 100 users simultaneously, for free. Paid plans allow you to give up to 1000 permissions, sign in up to 50 moderators, and use unlimited cloud storage.
It’s surprising, but such a huge capacity manages to work without freezing or annoying glitches. The Gallery View allows you to see the image from everyone’s cameras at the same time. Zoom got the highest ranks on Capterra, G2 Crowd, and TrustRadius leaving Google Meet and Skype far behind.
Google Drive – File Management
Google reports that more than 1.2 billion users are registered in their cloud service for individual and corporate needs. Google Drive provides you with 15GB of free cloud space, which is enough to store thousands of text documents or images, short videos, audio, archives, and any other files.
Google Drive is integrated into all the services above, allowing you to exchange files without the need to switch between apps. Unregistered users can download files too. All the collaborators of a corporate Drive can structure files and documents by folders, tag them, and highlight folders with colors. ToBeProductive.com once tested Google Drive 6 years ago, and now all our documents are stored there.
Conclusion
Making up a custom office suite is not very expensive, even for small startups. Free plans by Google Docs, Drive, Zoom, Slack, and Trello make it possible to run a team of up to 100 members without significant limitations. The more users you pay for, the cheaper these services become.
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