At Monterail, we believe in human interaction being prior to tools and processes. This and similar beliefs have always made us feel strongly connected to the Agile Manifesto.

At the same time, we were always open to partially-remote work and had a few team members being almost 100% off-site. This has forced us to develop multiple remote work habits and establish a proven toolset throughout the years.

Those routines have been helping us to make sure everyone, regardless of where their desk is currently located, feels equally engaged and integrated with the rest of the team. This quarter, we introduced a remote-first approach that allows all the employees to work both from our office or home according to their preference.

Currently, our office is closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and everyone works remotely, so those tools are even more useful than before. Below are a few of the great tools we’ve been using over the past years. These come in handy especially when you're moving your company to partial or fully remote work.

These tips can be applied for remote teams in any industry, so if you're not from the IT world, don't hesitate to keep reading. Hopefully, they will help you make the team feel integrated and keep your business productive.

The importance of choosing your toolset

It's essential to choose proper tools that empower remote work as communication and good work management will be crucial and may turn out to be the most troublesome aspect.

Here are a few tools you may want to consider divided by their application:

Daily Chat and Communication

Slack - it is one of the most common messaging tools for teams these days. It is great for creating topic-based channels, link sharing, chat and video communication. It’s worth trying out, even for big teams.

RocketChat - free alternative to Slack, fewer features but can be self-hosted.

Discord - mostly used by gamers, it is a solid tool that offers excellent voice communication and allows you to create multiple channels



Remote Meetings

zoom.us - One of the best video chat tools on the market. The free plan has a limitation for the meeting's length.

Source: www.zoom.us

Google hangouts / meet - it’s free but it doesn't offer as many features as Zoom does. Nevertheless it easy to implement, since virtually everyone has a Google account.

Go-To-Meeting - a competition to zoom.us, a good tool with slightly cheaper Business plan.

Slack - offers decent voice and video meetings features so it’s good as an all-round communication tool.

Task Management

Jira - It’s currently the most robust and flexible task management platform, very helpful if you’re working in the Scrum methodology. It is quite expensive, but it’s customizable and lets you effectively plan and track your team’s work.

Source: www.atlassian.com/software/jira

Trello - It’s a free tool for basic task management. It doesn't offer any metrics by default and can work for you if you don’t manage a lot of tasks at once.

Monday.com - a relatively new tool on a rise of popularity. Good for teams working in Agile, it enables you to create custom workflows.

Asana - a new, popular tool for remote teamwork and task management. It offers integrations with many applications and enables you to control what happens across projects.

USE Together - a tool for remote pair programming and team collaboration. It’s a good tool for developers.

Knowledge sharing & discussions

Guild.co - an award-winning platform for professional discussions and knowledge sharing. It is a fully secure and invitation-only application that works like a messenger for professionals.

Source: www.guild.co

Knowledge base

notion.so - a great tool for writing and organizing documents

Google Docs - the most popular platform offering documents, spreadsheets, storage, collaborative working, and more.

Dropbox Paper - similar to the notion.so but with less cataloging features.

Github - A great developer-oriented platform for teamwork management. We’ve recently published our Remote Best Practices on GitHub and we plan to build our knowledge base there.

Sales and Marketing tools

HubSpot - it’s an all-round marketing and sales hub that serves many purposes. It has features perfect for blog publishing, email marketing campaigns or sales lead categorization.

Pipedrive - a great sales CRM for storing notes and details about clients, managing sales and customer success activities and feedback for marketing.

Zapier - a good tool for workflow automation and integration across apps.

SurferSEO - a great SEO tool useful for content creation and relevant keyword research.

Milanote - this app enables you to collect notes and ideas and organize them into visual boards. It’s a great choice for managing creative projects yourself or with a team.

Other useful tools

https://krisp.ai - it’s a background noise canceling tool that’s very helpful during calls, especially if you don’t have a private, quiet workspace.

Headphones - it may seem obvious, but a good set of headphones can really come in handy these days.

Whichever tools you choose, make sure the entire team knows what's your choice and everybody sticks to the same ones.

There's no perfect solution; however, the worst thing that can happen is to get your teams divided and distributed by not having a common toolset. That could not only harm your team members by being isolated from the others but also make your business ineffective by having communication and knowledge spread across multiple platforms.

When you choose a common toolset, make sure to stick to it and continuously ask the entire team for their feedback to make them part of it and be sure you're improving.

Those are the rules and tools we use on a daily basis and recommend to ensure smooth team communication. Remember not to overdo it with the tools - after all, what counts is that we communicate and get the work done.