The 7 Tools You Shouldn’t Live Without Whilst Working Remotely

Here at Snap Out, we like to give you a little bit of insight into what goes on behind closed (office!) doors.

Every morning, we share a “Daily Snap” on Twitter and LinkedIn of what’s on in our schedule. We tell you if we have any exciting meetings, projects, news to celebrate and, of course, if we’re simply having a “head in our laptops” kind of day.

We’ve also been very open about the fact that we love flexible working. We like to give the Snap Out Team the choice to work where they feel most comfortable, whether that’s an office or remotely! In fact, we think that remote working often makes more business sense and leads to happier staff.

There’s no denying that it has its challenges, though. Having a team that can work from pretty much anywhere (we do limit people to places that have a wifi signal!) means that we need to get creative. As such, over the years we’ve tried a lot of different pieces of software, websites and applications to see what can help us to be our best, most productive selves as a business.

Today we’re going to lay out the ones that we love and that we don’t think you should be living without if you ever work remotely!

Slack

Let’s start off with an obvious one.

Having a centralised place for messaging that isn’t email is absolutely essential for us. Whilst emails certainly have their place, we consider Slack the area where we discuss anything that would be said between desks in the office! It allows us to quickly send questions or comments, as well as quickly receive responses.

We also love the ability to have group conversations between teams and about particular events or topics. This stops staff from becoming overwhelmed with messages that aren’t necessarily related to them.

The best part is that Slack is free for use up to 5GB of storage. We don’t feel restricted at all on the free plan, as we make sure that any important information or files are securely sent via email. This means that they don’t get deleted overtime when we exceed the 5GB Slack limit.

Airtable

Our marketing team loves Airtable.

Essentially, the online software allows you to create spreadsheets easily and efficiently, that you can share with as many people as you want. The huge variety of templates on offer makes it great for organising marketing campaigns and ensuring that daily tasks are being completed.

Plus, it’s much more visually appealing than most!

Trello

Trello is also a total lifesaver for our team! It’s a brilliant project management tool. It allows you to organise tasks into boards, so that you can quickly see what’s being worked on currently, who’s working on it, and the progress of a task.

It helps to keep everyone on the same page. And some of our staff have even started using it to organise their lives at home!

Team Gantt

Another project management tool that we love is Team Gannt

Gantt charts are a great resource when planning and creating a schedule for projects. They allow you to get a better idea of how long a project will take, allow you to plan the necessary resources and to understand the best order to do smaller tasks.

Team Gantt allows you to utilise this in real-time with other people.

Google Hangouts

We’re rarely ever all in the same building at once. That means that most of our meetings are video calls. From daily catch ups, to our monthly team meetings, we love Google Hangouts.

It keeps things simple as we connect it to our calendars, can share each other’s screens as needed and only need to sign into our Gmail accounts to use it.

Google Docs

In the same vein, we couldn’t live without Google Docs. It’s simple and does exactly what it needs to: Allows us to create, share and edit documents within our organisation.

Hubspot

Another marketing team favourite, Hubspot allows you to centralise all of your marketing activities. It assists through the whole process from attracting visitors, to converting leads and closing.

Functionalities include “content creation, social media sharing, workflow automation, lead capture, customer relationship management, sales pipeline mapping and performance tracking” (Six and Flow).

There are a tonne of tools out there to help make remote working as effective as possible and we’re always looking to learn more! So, if you know if any that you’d recommend, please let us know by sending us a tweet.

The Snap Out Team ⛰️