Work remotely, stay productive: 7 tools for remote work for businesses, community builders and event organizers

The future of a fully remote workforce is already here, and more evenly distributed than ever before. In the past few weeks, thousands of businesses have moved their operations entirely online with tools for remote work, changing the way many of us do our jobs. We witnessed Zoom becoming a social network overnight. We too use Slack more than before, and double-down on Asana.

We have more video meetings in our Google Calendars and yes, there’s an uptick of dogs’ and kids’ photos in our Slack feeds. And as we’ve leaned into remote to stay productive, we’ve pulled a list of useful remote work tools for businesses, community builders and event organizers looking to navigate this new all digital workspace. 

7 useful tools for remote work for businesses, community builders and event organizers:

1. Video Conferencing: When it comes to video conferencing, Zoom is our household go-to – an essential tool for remote work. With encrypted HD audio and video conferencing and easy chat tools, it’s a great way to host meetings and stay connected to your team. An added perk: personalized backgrounds that allow you to disguise a messy apartment or imagine yourself taking meetings from the beach — and breakout rooms, so that more than one person can talk at a time.  
2. Digital Whiteboards: Missing the days of whiteboarding out your ideas with team members? Miro.com is a virtual whiteboard platform that allows you to collaborate in real-time with colleagues all over the world. We use virtual sticky notes to plan out customer journey maps and share design drafts for feedback. With Adobe Creative Cloud fully integrated into the platform, Miro is a decent alternative to our office whiteboard.
3. Collaborative Design: Figma has been called the “Google Docs for designers.” This collaborative design tool allows us to better organize our design files, and also keep design, prototypes, and feedback all in one place, without having to export large files or sift through different versions. It’s a great addition to tools for remote work if you have designers on your team.
4. Professionalized Screen-sharing: Find yourself sharing screens with colleagues more often while working from home? As we’ve recently discovered, with the Muzzle App you can silence random notifications from family or friends, and screen-share like a pro during meetings and presentations. 
5. Silencing Background Noise: Dog barking over your important phone calls? Krisp.AI both removes background noise from your outgoing calls and cancels background noise coming from call participants to you. Calls are clearer, more productive and interruption free. Parents and pet-owners on our team were especially happy to learn this exists.
6. Online Events: In the past few months, we’ve seen countless signature events and conferences shut down due to COVID-19, leaving community builders and event organizers scrambling for good software options (because Zoom, while a decent backup option, just isn’t flexible enough). We’ve looked at a number of virtual event startups and their tools for remote work, like Run the World, “a hybrid of Zoom video, Eventbrite ticketing, Twitch interactivity, and LinkedIn networking.” and TechTO’s platform of choice, Hopin, which combines livestream presentations with virtual networking. Their ChatRoulette-style feature allows you to easily meet other attendees and facilitates what most of us attend events for anyway: making connections. It is awkward at first, but also good fun.
7. Multicasting: For this, we’ve found platforms like Switchboard and Prism Live Studio, which allow you to simultaneously broadcast your livestreams across major social media channels like Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Prism Live Studio is particularly slick, with its video effects, chat-monitoring functions, and their UX that makes it easy to edit and broadcast from a phone. Yes it is more professional than Instangram stories/live. 

Now is the time to do what every innovator does best: adapt. If you have remote work tools you’ve discovered that work for you, we’d love to hear about it!

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