In the current era, epidemic doesn’t cause much of a casualty with the advancement of medical preparation today. The true impact of the epidemic is the economic challenge that would be faced by the global. As when the movement control started, most of the businesses still operate as usual, and most of us are still able to work from home. We are lucky today as compared with the days without the internet. 

Companies that don’t have the culture of working from home are definitely not ready for remote working. Companies with working remote culture wouldn’t have to worry about their operation when the government  advised employers to have employees to work from home. 

For SMEs, the real challenge for working remotely is productivity. At psychology level, most of the employers will doubt if the team will continue to work as usual when there isn’t  someone monitoring them, this is not hard to assume that most of the bosses have the worry based on the strict clock in and out culture. Anyway, in Bravo Net, we believe that the working style needs to be improvised depending on your industry and the stage your company is currently at. Regardless of working remotely or not, we’ve set a standard operating system to assist us to communicate and follow up effectively with handy business tools that are available in the market and we are going to introduce them to the public so that some of the companies could benefit from it.

5 Types Of Tool You Must Have to Manage A Remote Team Effectively

Virtual Meeting with Skype

We used Skype constantly for our meetings whenever there are anything urgent that needs to be explained clearly. One thing we like about Skype is the screen sharing and video recording which allow us to recap all the points that we’ve discussed during the meetings. Skype is free for use for anyone.

Skype isn’t the only option in the market. You should try on some of the recommended tools like Zoom, Whereby.com, Google Hangout, etc. 

Virtual Whiteboard with Sketch.io/sketchpad

We use it with a whiteboard in the meeting room when face to face. Sketch.io isn’t a whiteboard, but it allows us to do digital sketch. Drawing with cursor may not be as easy as using a marker pen, but hey, practise makes perfect right? It’s free for use and you can save it as an image file once you have done. 

Internal Team Communication with Fleep.io

Big corporations subscribe with tools like Microsoft Team but with some startup size like us, we probably will not go for enterprise range of packages. Many companies stick with WhatsApp because of its common usage and convenience, which their employees don’t like and they didn’t voice out. Fleep.io provides us a very simple interface mainly focusing on internal communication. Of course there are other outstanding tools widely used by startups like Slack, all you need to do is just pick the one that suits your needs.

Explanation tools with Loom & Awesome Screenshot

We’ve covered loom https://www.bravonet.my/2019/03/11/introduce-loom-for-video-communication/ when we discovered the app that solves the issue of communication breakdown during the explanation of some complex topic. A video is worth a thousand words. Instead of writing a long email with tons of image attachment just to inform the other party to remove a button in a task, Loom makes it easier for us to explain and speed up the entire communication process by 10x more efficiently than email. Sadly, some companies still prefer email.

Another awesome tool to recommend is the awesome screenshot. Sometimes there isn’t a need to record a video to explain, just a simple screenshot with some text on it will be simple enough to replace the lengthy text in email. 

Task follow up with Clickup

Task management tools aren’t something new. But don’t be surprised that most companies still rely on email to follow up their tasks. We’ve been using many task management tools like Trello, Meistertask, Microsoft Planner, Jira, etc. Finally we’ve made up our mind to go for Clickup and subscribed to it’s paid version after weighing all the pros and cons of each tool. Most importantly the pricing & features provided by Clickup I would say it is the most value for money.

We’ve covered most of the essential tools you need to run a remote team. The tools are ready but will the people? No matter how sharp your knife is, if no one learns to use it, the meat will still remain uncut.