The modern workplace is evolving and more companies are taking advantage of skilled talent available around the world. Remote teams bring many benefits they also have their own set of challenges. Communication seems to be the biggest challenge. Now we have a lot of great tools to make communication easier. The tools can make or break a remote team. And therefore it is important to select the right ones.

Tools for Remote Communication:

1. Slack: A remote company still needs headquarter or virtual space to hang out. It is also one of the most popular communication tool used by distributed teams. It is a glue which holds remote teams together. There are company-wide channels for business and fun, every team has its own channel and coworkers can connect privately over direct messages.

2.HipChat: This is another great tool by Atlassian. If your team uses other Atlassian products or Jira you can integrate HipChat with it.

3. Google Hangouts: Hangouts lets you launch a hangout right from within a channel

4. Zoom: This is a good alternative to hangouts and has a higher threshold for the number of people who can be in a meeting at once.

5. Skype: Free to use locally and globally, you can do instant messaging, voice and video calls as well as group calls from the desktop or mobile app.

6. Jell: Jell takes the concept of standup meetings and automates it. Everyday team members answer three questions which are automatically posted into the appropriate team Slack channel. A short video call is conducted daily to review.

Tools for Cloud Collaboration and File Management:

1.Dropbox: This is one of the easiest document sharing options available. It is simple to teach all your team members and no data management system is needed. When something is added to a Dropbox folder, it is automatically available to all users with access.

2. Google Drive: Free and easy storing and collaboration of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with your google account.

3. Box: Box allows you to securely share files with your team, starting at just $5 per user. Documents are encrypted and you can grant and revoke user permissions at your discretion.

        There are other alternatives like One Hub and Huddle.

Tools for Productivity

1. iDoneThis: It is a tool used by remote teams to keep tabs on each other’s progress

Tools for Project Management:

1.JIRA: It is used for managing work sprints across dev and marketing teams alike. JIRA is a very robust project and issue tracker.

2. Trello: Trello creates boards to manage your entire project. You can see at a glance who is working on what and when the tasks are due. The basic version of Trello is free.

3.Asana: Works particularly well for remote teams because of all the options available to manage and track tasks.

Tools for Development and Design:

1. GitHub: This is the ultimate tool for developers to host their code online. It is also a site of choice to host company wikis.

2. Skitch: This app by Evernote allows remote teams to annotate, markup and quickly sketch out ideas. You can get it for your desktop, tablet, and phone and get to work no matter where you are.

3. CodePen: Write and share HTML/CSS & Javascript with this app. You can share the code with your remote team members and preview the code and get feedback in real time.

4. Cloud9: A development environment in the cloud featuring its own code editor and Ubuntu workspace.

Bonus Tool:

Tool for validating code quality:

Conclusion:

Effective communication is essential for all companies, but there are some additional communication challenges inherent to distributed companies. At RemotePanda, it is also important for us to get together at every milestone. Rest of the time we rely on the tools to help us connect, communicate and collaborate.

To know more about Virtual teams or want to hire a remote team from RemotePanda please feel free to contact RemotePanda, also remote teams come with its own set of challenges. To manage these challenges you can visit our blog Managing virtual Team

About RemotePanda

RemotePanda is a personalized platform for companies to hire remote talent and get the quality work delivered from the city Pune. The resources in our talent pool are our close network connections. While connecting them with you, we make sure to manage the quality, growth, legalities, and the delivery of their work. The idea is to make remote work successful for you. Get in touch with us to learn why RemotePanda is the best fit solution for your business requirements.