I am sure that you already have Zoom, Slack and Asana on your computer. But daily office life is more than written tasks and planned meetings. There are lunches with your team, spontaneous talks near the water cooler, common tasks and goals you want to acheive. It’s your comfortable workplace and it by itself motivates you to be productive. Just look at the bunch of stickers on the wall — big things are waiting for you!
Life in office has a lot of invisible and important processes in it. After we all switched to remote work, many of these processes disappeared from our lives. But it seems to me that we can move them online painlessly.
So let’s talk about these processes and the tools that help us recreate the office vibe at home! The ones that help remote teams keep in touch, talk to each other more and don’t miss the opportunities they could have in the office.
p.s. You will not find very popular tools here. And I did it in purpose.
How to create the atmosphere of the office home
Try TandemChat.
Description: it’s a virtual office — you can quickly interact with colleagues, spontaneously call them and work together on the same platforms (Trello, Notion, Google Docs, etc.)
Analogs: RemoteHQ, Teemly, Pragli, Makespace [not launched yet], With [not launched yet], wfhland [not launched yet].
How to recreate the feeling of the meeting in one place
Try HighFidelity.
Description: virtual spaces that simulate real meetings.
Analogs: Connect.club, Airmeet.
How to recreate the small talks before the meetings
Try Brightful.
Description: short games / quizzes that are designed to help the participants of the meeting to find connection with each other in a friendly way.
How to replace the meeting-boards that help you find the best decisions
Try Ment.
Description: A visual platform that simplifies decision-making for teams.
How to recreate the opportunity to meet colleagues spontaneously (and not only colleagues)
Try NextPage.
Description: An app that allows you to meet spontaneously online with colleagues and friends.
How to recreate the tradition to put stickers on the board
Try Parabol.
Description: software for conducting online retrospectives.
How to transfer the coffee breaks from offline to online
With Hallway.
Description: A Slack bot that automatically allocates time for joint coffee breaks.
How to recreate the code cross-editing process
Try GitDuck.
Description: tools for developers that enables to talk, share your code and do pair programming with ease.
How to recreate the feeling of being idle in front of colleagues
Try Focusmate.
Description: “virtual coworking” — where you can easily find a “colleague”, and monitor the concentration and productivity of each other.
How to replace meeting moderator
Try Macro.
Description: an add-on for video calls services (Zoom, Meet) that helps make meetings more efficient.
How to recreate the daily stand-up’s with your teammates
Try Standups.
Description: “stories for stand-ups” — update each other regardless of their time zone or location, using async video & voice messages.
How to replace assistant who makes meeting notes
Try Hugo.
Description: An app that makes it easy to create, store, and collaborate on notes after a meeting.
How to recreate an opportunity to share emotions during meetings
Try Nod.
Description: extension for Google Chrome that allows you to exchange emotions during Google Meet calls.
How to replace assistant who helps you with your schedule
Try Clockwise.
Description: An app for G-Suite that optimizes your calendar, searching for a best time for a focused work.
How to replace meetings, yep, all the meetings (even virtual ones)
Try SlashTalk [not launched yet, but seems promising — from creators of Meerkat и Houseparty]
Description: it is not clear yet, but their manifesto says that they want to decentralize communication within the teams completely.