If you’re like a lot of entrepreneurs nowadays, chances are that you have a growing remote team of staff based pretty much anywhere around the world that help you run, support and grow your business and kudos to you! That is the way to go. However, are you working with them productively and as efficiently as you possibly can?
In this video, we're going to be talking all about working remotely with staff utilizing five tools that quite frankly, if they disappeared one by one off the face of the earth, I'd have problems running my business. These online tools can really promote the productivity and efficiency that every business owner wants from their team.
Trello
Myself and my team use this quite frankly for pretty much everything we do when it comes to our online content creation publication and marketing. What I love about it the most is you can have separate boards for individual team members that are working on different pieces of content at any one time and as the boss, I can peep in and see where everybody is when it comes to their actual workflow.
Along with that, you can also have individual boards on Trello that you can all collaborate on with one particular project so for example, our annual conference the Youpreneur Summit which takes place in London, England, every November. We can have several members of our team scattered all around the world who then combine their work and collaborate on that one particular project board on all the different aspects that we have to cover when it comes to that event. We can have people mentioning what’s going on with certain supplies for things like printable items that we might need, following up with the speakers or potentially maybe it’s marketing and ticket sales – so it’s easy to go in and have a look at everything in one place.
Slack
Slack pretty much killed email for our company, we still email each other from time to time, obviously, but almost all of our day to day communication happens inside of slack. It's like instant messaging on steroids, literally. What I love about Slack is you can have individual channels, a little bit like Trello where everybody can be part of that discussion, but you can also just directly message, each other as well if you've got things that you want to discuss with one particular team member that you don't necessarily want everybody else to see, or they don't need to see, one way or the other, slack is huge!
The only thing that's missing on Slack, just one man's opinion here, is the ability to send audio messages directly from their mobile app… So, if there's anybody from Slack watching, sort it out, will you?! Let us record some audio messages with each other!
Google Drive
What I love about this is it takes your slide decks, your spreadsheets, and your word documents and makes them all available online for all of your team members to work on at the same time, in a really collaborative approach. Again, you can block things off so nobody can actually edit something, and only see what's up there.
It's fantastic for things like content planning because we can go back and forth on ideas and use different colors for my notes and maybe for Chloe who's on my team who handles a lot of our content creation, and maybe Morgan and Erz will also dial in when it comes to things like financials, or slide designs etc. It's all online. It's all in the cloud, as they say, and that's great because ultimately frees up space on your hard drives, as well.
Zoom
This ultimately has killed Skype for me. I used to be a very very loyal and extremely consistent Skype user, but over recent years, they've certainly had a few problems when it comes to video quality in and amongst other things. What I love about Zoom is that they have a webinar platform you can just do video conferencing, as well, and it's super easy to use. Yes, a little bit like Skype, you do need to download a piece of software but it's very simple and easy to do and it gives you the ability to be able to see everyone up to I think almost 70 people, all at the same time on one screen. It works fantastic. We use it for our Youpreneur incubator mastermind group, and I use it personally for when I'm catching up with friends, as well as doing interviews for the podcast and anything else we've got going on.
Dropbox
There are two different options on Dropbox: personal or business. However, it really doesn’t matter. The fact is that Dropbox is a game changer when it comes to secure file storage for online businesses. Again, you can share folders which will have individual files in them, or you can just share individual files directly with your freelancers or your team members, whatever the case may be.
What I love about Dropbox the most is that it does sync directly with your hard drive. So you do have a copy of everything that's up in the cloud, on your hard drive specifically, so you don't need to be connected to the Internet to utilize it, you can do it on airplanes and all the rest of it as well. However, if you do want to free up space, you can decide what files actually sit on your computer, and which ones will sit up in the cloud. Super easy to use, very reasonable from a pricing perspective, and we would be pretty much done without Dropbox!
Resources Mentioned
Chris founded Youpreneur® in 2015. He is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of the bestselling books “Virtual Freedom” and “Rise of the Youpreneur”. He hosts our podcast, live events and coaches our clients inside the Youpreneur Incubator. Chris is based in Cambridge, UK.
