COVID-19 is gradually taking a downward turn in some countries. And although the pandemic might be going away, is the work-from-home culture coming to an end too? The overnight shift from office culture to remote working took the world by storm, and it paved the way for many online tools to become mainstream that was otherwise limited to existing remote workers only.
The remote working model did its magic, and an increasing number of companies have made remote working its permanent model of work. The silver lining of remote working is that its model tends to favor both employers and employees.
One of the major contributors to the effectiveness of remote work culture is the powerful SaaS tools. As a result, the remote teams have grown quite fond of select SaaS tools, and in this article, we will be listing out the best SaaS tools that complement the remote working model.
1. Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a ubiquitous tool used by lots of SaaS Startups, owing to how affordable it is, starts at just $5.00.
With Microsoft Teams, your whole organization can be on a shared virtual communication platform. It allows users to chat with their colleagues, do video conferencing, share their screens to demonstrate concepts. Practically, users can create channels and collaborate better with team partners segregated according to the type of operation they are supposed to execute.
What I love the most about Microsoft teams is the fact that its in sync with OneDrive. You also get a calendar feature to schedule the calls and sync your Outlook email so that you can stay in sync with your schedule and all the meetings you are supposed to attend.
2. Slack
Slack and yet another fantastic communication platform that remote teams are increasingly using.
Slack shares some common features with Teams, but I like the most about Slack is its intuitive user interface. The user experience that comes with this amazing platform makes the journey more manageable for me to find my way across the messages that I am trying to find, conversations in the channels that I want to join.
Some of the highlights of Slack are that it allows you to integrate certain apps to automate many things.
You can integrate apps like Jira, Google Calendar, Miro, Asana, Google Drive, Airtable, Kyber, Dropbox, Simple Poll, Trello, Zoom, and more.
Another exciting thing that will excite the developers is that you can share your code using snippets so that the other developer receiving it can open the snippet dialogue and copy the code more conveniently.
3. GSuite
GSuite is the ultimate tool that a lot of remote working teams are utilizing. GSuite comes with pretty much everything that we already love using.
Many people prefer using Gmail as their preferred email communication medium because, unlike other vendors, Gmail comes with more additional features and has an intuitive UI that’s more simplistic yet useful.
What’s more? You can add many extensions to Gmail to give it more power; extensions like GMass to shoot a mail to more people at once and everyone receives email individually, there are mail merge extensions that give you more control.
With GSuite, you now get more cloud storage on your Google Drive; using your custom email of Google, you can easily use other Google products like Google Meet and Office products that many external teams use already.
4. Trello
Trello is yet another incredible tool for project and task management.
Managing projects and tasks on Excel or Sheets is a pain; I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the sharing features these good old tools come with but drifting across tabs in sheets and excel is a pain.
Head over to Trello, here you can essentially create boards, invite your team, create cards based on the type of work, and add work cards in that along with the due date of when that task is supposed to finish and who is responsible for completing it.
Teammates missing the due date will get notified over email that they have missed the deadline, and this prompts the whole team to work without getting reminder messages from superiors.
Many tools come with Trello integrations that make it easier to assign tasks on Trello; tools like SEMrush, Zapier will find 3,000+ integrations for Trello with some popular tools like Gmail, Google Sheets, Slack, and so many more.
5. Asana
Asana is another fantastic gem on the list of project management tools often used as a replacement for tools like Wrike. In this NYSE-listed project management tool, you can add team members under specific campaigns and create segregation as per execution stages. This tool also allows you can create and assign tasks to teammates and set the deadline for when to expect things to get done.
Asana keeps everyone in the loop throughout the cycle of the project and gets things done.
This brings us to the end of this listicle. We hope you find these remote tools handy and helpful for navigating through the remote work culture.