6 Tools We Use To Work Together Better As A Remote Team
So, you’re starting to grow your company and you’re hitting those growing pains that come with too many things to do but not enough time to do it. You hire a VA or two… or maybe even some part-time or full-time employees. But if you’re not all working in the same office together… how do you make sure the team works together smoothly when you’re hundreds (or thousands) of miles away? Here’s how we do it here at Carrot and some of the tools that we use every day as a remote team. Making A Remote Team Work There are some amazing things about building a “remote” team. If you’ve never heard of that term, it’s basically where all or most of your team members are separated by a distance (usually in different cities, states, or even countries). This is a pretty darn common thing these days with the technology we have access to that makes working from a distance a lot easier. Now, on the flip side, there are some things about building a remote team that makes building a great company harder. You have to work harder to build a great culture that your team loves being a part of. You have to be more self-driven since your time is usually more flexible and it’s easier to slip into bad habits. You have to make sure you still find ways to build personal connections with your team members so they’re not just a person doing a task… but a person that’s part of the mission that your company is on. How does the Carrot team look? At Carrot, we have a small staff of full-time team members that work here out of our headquarters in Roseburg, Oregon. Another set of of full-time team members are in other cities throughout Oregon. Then the rest of our company is all over the United States, working remote. Utah, California, North Carolina, you name it. So what tools do we use the most that we couldn’t live without? Here are our top 6. Slack – The Way We Communicate Every Day Look at all of the places you’re currently sending and receiving messages. Odds are you’re using multiple programs to communicate with your team. And it’s costing you time and a big hassle for everyone. When we first started this company and had just a few people, we’d basically send each other a lot of emails and if we needed something fast we’d fire up a Google chat. Those worked, but what happened was my inbox would get filled with emails and I’d find myself in my Gmail account all day long. I’m easily distracted, so being in my email account all day long really opened me up to let other people control my agenda with their emails. At times I’d have 150+ unread messages in there. Plus, if we wanted to send a file or a video, or look up a conversation we had in the past it would take me forever to do it and I could hardly ever find past conversations when I looked for them. In the end, we were using all of these systems and I had to be logged into Skype, Gmail, Google Drive, and several other systems. Enter Slack. Slack seems like a totally unnecessary tool when you first hear about it. I thought the same thing when my CTO said that we should try it out. “Arg, another thing I’ve got to log into now?” But now I can’t imagine running our business without it. How do we use Slack to save time and … Continued