As a company that has been fully remote since its inception, we have learned a lot about which tools help leaders enhance communication in an asynchronous remote work environment. Here are a few tools that we use for internal communication amongst team members on a daily basis.

Slack

Slack is a convenient, user-friendly business communication platform that allows work teams to communicate both internally and with external clients.

What We Use it For:

• To connect our entire team in a shared company chatroom as our primary form of communication and collaboration both internally and with client stakeholders
• To discuss operations, audience & revenue, and organize internal work
• To sync project documentation spaces and task tracking system activity back to project chatrooms through integrations
• To aggregate a comprehensive and searchable history of communication and activity within a project team
• To create ongoing transparency and awareness to team members and client stakeholders within a project
• To broadcast to our teammates what we are working on each day, and solicit help if we are blocked in any way
• To send quick reminders and collaborate on changes to deliverables
• To quickly check in with portfolio clients, run assets by them, and schedule meetings
• To enable more rapid reference to or use of materials in third-party systems–such as kicking off a Google Meet or sharing private Google Docs with specific individuals–by way of Slack Apps

Why We Like It:

• It allows us to be effective at our asynchronous-first approach
• It keeps all team members and client stakeholders in the loop without having to remember who to CC or what thread something was in
• It supports file attachments, app functionality with integrations, and is very easily searchable
• It allows us to quickly talk to several different combinations of people and elaborate on more in-depth points through starting individual threads
• We can easily see when our teammates are in meetings and when they are actively working so we can make sure to open communication with them at optimal times
• We can invite individual employees to specific channels to organize work flows and bring people into the right conversations
• It speeds up the onboarding process, especially with an all-remote team spread out in different time zones
• It allows us to alert people to particularly relevant information by tagging their names so that the content doesn’t get lost and they know to look at it when they have a chance.
• It provides a quick means for us to run things by client stakeholders for feedback at several stages throughout the app development process.
• It allows us to create both private channels for internal conversations and public channels to interact with our portfolio clients who we work with on a regular basis.
• We can jump on quick voice calls or video calls without pre-scheduling if need be.
• We can easily share external files with one another directly on Slack.
• It allows for the seamless integration of several other useful apps.

Geekbot

Geekbot is a Slack integration that helps you to run asynchronous standup meetings and share daily internal updates.

What We Use it For:

• To manage asynchronous morning stand-ups, starting at 10AM in each team member’s local time zone each day
• To stay up to date with individuals’ priorities
• To see which hours each team member plans to be actively available that day, allowing team members peace of mind when they have a doctor’s appointment or need to be on full-time parent duty that day
• To share what each individual plans to prioritize working on that day
• To see whether yesterday’s goals were completed or if any work is outstanding
• To understand if the employee is being blocked by anything specifically
• To increase transparency around each team member’s progress against their goals within the active two-week sprint cycle on their projects

Why We Like It:

• Realistically, it takes 30 seconds to report during a stand-up. Yet, most companies waste approximately 30 minutes per day in synchronous stand-up meetings. Using Geekbot for stand-ups helps us to remain efficient.
• It allows us to see what everyone is working on in an efficient, asynchronous manner.
• It easily integrates with Slack.
• It provides some daily consistency for individuals and helps them to think about the structure of their work for the day.
• It gives managers insight into what is happening in the business without wasting extensive time on status meetings.
• It allows us to maintain our asynchronous-first workflow.

Notion

Notion is a documentation space that allows teams to collaborate on product specifications, road mapping, note taking and document formation, and content management.

What We Use it For:

• To prepare and share agendas in advance of client meetings
• To take and share notes
• To organize our content calendars across social media, our internal website development, and our blog
• To construct and share proposals and task breakdowns with prospective clients
• To draft and collaborate on new internal marketing and branding content
• To aid in onboarding and convey the company’s mission and values
• To organize basic task lists
• To collaborate on road mapping for mobile app builds
• To outline and communicate specs for new projects

Why We Like It:

• Notion is an excellent and flexible wiki-like tool that makes it easy for team members and client stakeholders to reference material repeatedly throughout the lifecycle of a product.
• It’s an all inclusive documentation workspace that makes it easy to collaborate on project road mapping in real time.
• It is an easy to use and adaptable interface that allows us to detail new project specs, progress towards key milestones, and note project completion.
• It is easy to organize content within projects and make sure that team members have access to all applicable documentation.
• There are so many different options regarding how information can be structured on the platform.
• It is a great place for collaborative note-taking.

Linear

Linear is a task management tool that is useful when organizing the several components of software sprints, tracking bugs, and outlining all tasks associated with a new build.

What We Use it For:

• To tag key projects that are tied to client outcomes so that work remains streamlined internally
• To create internal project identifiers used for the purposes of measuring effort and our rate of delivery against each project
• To organize key deliverables into two-week cycles
• To pass tasks back and forth between individuals on a team depending on the stage of the task’s progression
• To clearly assign tasks and articulate who is currently responsible for moving a task to the next stage of development
• To approximate how long a task will take
• To clearly hand off tasks for review and approval
• As a platform for project managers to provide feedback on deliverables before handing them back to clients for external review

Why We Like It:

• Changes are synchronized in real time so that all team members are informed about the current status of a task.
• You can make changes to your task status even if you are not currently connected to the internet.
• Its features are well-suited for software sprints.
• You can clearly tag the status of different tasks so that everyone involved is aware of the progress and changes made.
• It features integrations which can automate away the busy work of updating the status on a given task, using things like creating a new branch of code or submitting a pull request to automate status updates.

Harvest

Harvest provides an easy, user-friendly way for our team to record their time across every project, including internal efforts.

What We Use it For:

• To establish and enforce project budgets.
• To forecast and allocate budgets across the necessary resources, assisted by Harvest’s sister product, called Forecast.
• To record hours worked, when they were worked, and what task was worked on, across all of our team and projects.
• To produce time reports by client, project, and team member, over any arbitrary period of time.
• To produce client invoices, and as the official record for calculating and submitting hourly payroll.

Why We Like It:

• Harvest is incredibly easy to use, has a simple user interface, and only requires a few minutes of employees’ time to log hours.
• There is a seamless integration with Google Calendar which allows employees to upload all of their time to Harvest at once if they choose.
• It allows you to preload projects and subcategories to make it easy for employees to choose from drop-down menus when logging time.
• It offers excellent apps for desktop and mobile, as well as browser extensions, to make the process of switching between projects and recording time throughout the workday very seamless and low-effort.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a collaborative document sharing tool that allows employees to work together on projects in various mediums in real time.

What We Use it For:

• To collaborate on polished document-based deliverables for clients
• To brainstorm ideas in a collaborative medium
• To provide comments, feedback, and suggestions on one another’s work

Why We Like It:

• You can easily make edits to documents within the browser without having to open software.
• It provides an easy platform for managers and collaborators to comment on draft versions of work.
• It is a great way to manage folders of documentation on a platform that is supportive of several different file types.
• You can quickly revert to previous versions of the document.
• It is easy to control sharing permissions and give specific individuals access to relevant documentation.

There are a number of other tools and technologies that we use which are enablers of our all-remote, asynchronous-first approach to work. If you’re curious about how we solve for any specific challenges, feel free to contact us, and we’d be happy to share how we’ve made it work for us!