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5 useful and fresh tools for remote work in a distributed team



Recently, against the background of quarantine, because of you know what, the number of articles with collections of services for remote work has increased significantly. At first, I even tried to read such articles, but they are all written with a carbon copy and tell about such unknown tools as Zoom, Slack, Asana and, at best, Todoist.

I wanted to correct the situation a bit and talk about equally useful, but less well-developed tools that many might not really know. Almost all the appas from the collection are tested in personal work, and I’ll just start using one more.

World Time Buddy : Find Time Differences with Anywhere in the World


In my current project, a distributed team - the leaders are in the USA, I am in Moscow, there are fellow designers from Europe, sometimes I have to interact with partners in Kazakhstan and Southeast Asia. In this case, it is often necessary to collect a call for representatives of at least three different locations. For a humanist like me, calculating the time difference and sending an invitation to the calendar is a very difficult task. Many times I could not cope with it one hundred percent, as a result, calls moved out or were canceled altogether, the work schedule broke.

Then I found the World Time Buddy app. It works super-simple. You need to add your city, as well as one or more cities in which colleagues are located. Then the application displays a timeline with the hours of the working day for each of them - they will be superimposed on each other so that it will be easy to choose the time when everyone has not night or yet early morning.



As I began to use it, I can’t imagine my life without it. Probably, if a team is not very scattered around the world, and its members can use the calendar normally, you can do without World Time Buddy. But this site really helps me.

Toggl : easy-to-use task management tool





Everyone always writes at best about Trello, and worst about Asana or Jira in general, which is not very clear to the humanities. At the same time, for some reason Toggl is overlooked, but in vain. Initially, this is a time tracker that allows you to set aside time to solve various problems, and then see the timeline of what took more or less time.

I use it more as a planner to generally see my load and roughly understand the structure of the day at a glance.

Linguix Business : software for improving the quality of communications in English




I already wrote that I use Linguix to check my English texts - this is an extension for the browser (there is still a web app) that corrects typos and grammar errors, offers synonyms, and generates recommendations for improving the style. By the way, now this project is being discussed at Product Hunt .

Not so long ago, as a team, we introduced the corporate version of this system. In the project, I deal with content, I have several colleagues who write texts, I myself have to do this too. As a result, each of us installed an extension for ourselves, and we created a team in Linguix. Now I can see the overall productivity of the team - how much content we created (more or less than in the previous period), how many mistakes we made, etc. It is also convenient for scheduling downloads.



Krisp: remove background noise in online conferences


I think over the past couple of months of constant calls on Zoom from home, many have realized how background noise can distract. Children shout, neighbors with a puncher use isolation time to good use, sirens howl outside the window - when 3-5 people on a call each with their own background noise, this is really not easy.



In the past few months, we have been using the Krisp app on the team. It very cool removes background noise in Zoom, Skype and other similar applications. As a result, any online phoning is much more efficient.

Chimp or Champ: Anonymous Collection of Employee Reviews




Usually collecting feedback inside not only the company, but even the team is not a very grateful undertaking. If the reviews are not anonymous, then it will not work to get useful data. In turn, anonymous reviews collected one-time or once in a long period also do not say anything special.

Chimp or Champ is a system that once a week sends out an anonymous survey to employees, where they can share their impressions of the work, point out some problems, etc. The manager also receives a report once a week with a score of overall employee satisfaction and their comments / wishes. This is the only tool from the list that we have not yet implemented in the team, but are going to try it.

What remote tools do you use? Share the links in the comments, we will collect a complete list of useful and not yet hackneyed for different collections of applications.

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