With the spread of Covid-19, more and more businesses are opting for their employees to work remotely. With this in mind, we’re sharing a list of free tools that help us in our daily business when working remotely.
Communication
Communicating with clients and coworkers is a necessity.
Some people prefer to “instant message” or email, while others prefer to have a conversation over the phone. Depending on your team or the client you’re working with, you need to decide which method of communication works best for you or use a combination of options.
Chat
For chat we like to use Whatsapp, it’s free and most people have it on their phone already. When working from your computer, you can open whatsapp for the web in your browser using web.whatsapp.com.
Calls
The obvious choice is the phone, but costs soon skyrocket if you’re making a lot of calls at network rates. Instead, we use Whatsapp for calls (which are really cheap if all parties have their own wifi). We prefer not to call client’s on Whatsapp unless it’s agreed upon beforehand.
Video calls
Sometimes the nuances of what people say are lost on a voice call. Where possible, try to use video calls instead. If you’re working at your computer, tools like zoom.us for video conferencing are great. You can share your screen and have a video playing to see how people react to what you say.
Alternatively, you can use video calls on Whatsapp to individuals and groups. Not all people like it, but it can be helpful to see a person’s face when you’re discussing a concept.
Document Collaboration
We use Google Docs for document collaboration. It’s free and only requires a web browser. The tool has commenting and sharing built in so it’s really easy to make changes and track what’s changed. It saves you needing to email a document around to coworkers for comment (and then merge all the changes later).
It’s also useful as a “scratch pad” for a discussion that you’re having where you need to take notes or illustrate points (if you’re all viewing the document you can see the changes as they happen). The documents can be exported to Word and pdf too if you require this.
Task tracking
We use Trello for tracking tasks. The tool is very flexible and you can use it how you wish.
3 ways we use the tool:
Tracking bugs and feature requests
Assigning tasks to different employees (e.g. Development tasks, Design tasks, Testing tasks) and tracking progress.
Tracking leads and assigning leads to employees.
Document signing
Whether it’s signing lease agreements, insurance policy changes or HR documents, there’s always something to sign. For this we use our own tool QuicklySign.
QuicklySign allows you to have your contracts signed online, in a way that is secure and legal. Besides being simple for you, it’s great for your clients too as they no longer need to print, sign and scan documents. All that you and your client require is an internet browser so there’s no additional software to install.
Other benefits include:
Concurrent or sequential signing of documents (QuicklySign handles forwarding the signing request to the next person in the queue).
Built-in configurable reminders to request that a user must sign if they still haven’t done so after a predefined period of time.
Real-time view of progress - You can see who has opened the document and how far along through the process they are.
Mandatory and optional fields to ensure that all the correct data is captured.
Reusable templates for frequently sent documents (e.g. Lease agreements where only the names, address and rental amount change).
