Top 5 Tools for Remote Teams

Now that managing fully remote teams is becoming the new-normal for tech companies, here are our top 5 tools in no particular order:

#1 Microsoft Teams

This is our go-to tool at Lisbon Nearshore. Launched in 2017, with a significant effort in further developing and enriching the platform by Microsoft, Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. It’s a great teamwork hub, super secure and highly customizable with more and more apps being added or integrated with the platform.

#2 Microsoft Planner

A little known tool that you can also integrate with MS Teams, Microsoft Planner provides a simple, visual way to organize teamwork. It allows teams to create new plans, organize tasks, share files, chat about what they’re working on, and get updates on progress.

#3 Zoom

One of the winners of the global pandemic, Zoom had a meteoric rise and established itself as a giant for video conferencing, web conferencing and webinars in just a few months. Its as perfect for getting the whole company together for a digital happy hour, as to schedule smaller calls with teams, clients or suppliers.

A curious fact on Zoom’s impressive growth: it sparked a shopping frenzy of the company’s stock. However, ZOOM is a Delaware corporation that reported in 2014 having its principal executive offices in Beijing, China. Investors in the stock market, thinking they were purchasing stocks from Zoom Video, managed to triple the value of this unknown Chinese company, before the SEC suspended trading. Zoom Video – the actual company behind Zoom – only rose about 30% in the same period.

#4 Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management and team collaboration platform with the goal of being an all-in-one toolkit for working remotely. Remote work can be especially challenging when you’ve got stuff spread around documents, file services, chat logs, spreadsheets, etc. This can lead to critical information getting lost leading to inefficiencies that can have a long-lasting impact on your organization’s performance.

It offers a breadth of features and tools to split projects into various teams, organize communications between them and the clients, automatic project schedulling and more.

One curious thing about Basecamp is that the company has been 100% remote for more than 20 years and has written what many consider the bible of remote work – Remote: Office Not Required – available in bookstores and Amazon.

#5 Slack

One of the most popular tools around, Slack is, essentially, a chatroom for the whole organization. Its goal is to replace email as the primary means of communication and sharing of stuff. Its workspaces allow you to organize communication via channels for group discussions while allowing for private messages to share information, files, and more. You could say they are the baseline for all the new communication tools being launched by other companies.