The 3 Tools Every Team Needs to do Great Remote Work at Home

Remote work has accelerated 10 years in 10 days.

Companies are discovering they lack the capacity for remote work.

Minimum table stakes for great remote work: messaging, video and physical tools.

1. Messaging

To operate effectively as a team everyone needs to be on the same page. Messaging is a basic need for every team enabling both personal, project and team-wide communication on everything important inside the company. The best messaging tool is the one all your team members already know and understand because the learning curve is 0.

💬 Slack

Slack is the right tool for this. It is the product people are most familiar with and it is the one they want to use. We have tested every single available product for instant messaging and Slack is the most intuitive.

Slack enables your team to stay on the same page while maintaining a system of record for all communication relating to any product, team or issue.

2. Video

The right video tool is the one with the highest fidelity which is the closest to meeting in real life. This empowers your team to do great work as efficiently as possible via the ability to communicate well. Video calls are an essential component of continued human connection in teams and regular 'fact-to-face' conversation makes improves this significantly.

🗣️ Zoom

Zoom is the best video conferencing software on the market. It will enable your team to have the highest fidelity calls virtually which is critical for understanding and ensuring every message is communicated and received clearly.

If in-person meetings are the optimum form of communication, Zoom is the software product that lets you get closest to that.

3. Physical Tools

While the virtual tools that have enabled high quality, frictionless remote work were critical to enable remote work at scale there is a growing realization that there is a missing half of remote work. This is characterized by products and services which focus on the experience, culture and human connection of being a remote worker.

🛠️ Firstbase

Getting a remote team setup is hard, expensive and time-consuming. We built Firstbase as an internal tool to make sure that our team had everything they needed to do their best work at home in our last company. We discovered that every remote team struggles with this as well and offered it to other people as well.

Firstbase ensure your workers are safer, more comfortable and productive at home than they would be in an office.

Why Now?

Remote work is the biggest workplace revolution in history and nothing will deliver a higher quality of life increase in the next decade than this. Workers having more flexibility to decide their work schedule, able to operate when they are most productive rather than a fixed day, enables a far better future of work than the one we currently experience. Organizing work around your life is a huge transition with major implications. Gone is the requirement to beg your bosses permission to go to an appointment, it is the ability to drop and pick your child up from work every day with time in the afternoon to go for your recharging run.

Being handcuffed to an office and expected to live in a high cost of living city with a low quality of life is a remnant of the industrial revolution. The devolution of offices into almost factory-like conditions as distraction factory adult kids clubs is complete. The office has become the worst place on the planet to get the isolation and focus you need to do deep work.

Make no mistake, remote work is exploding to prominence right now. We are living through the inflection point today. Shortly, workers will realize their power and influence to demand remote work.

How Do I Develop a Remote Strategy?

We built an all-in-one provisioning platform that lets companies develop a remote work strategy instantly.

We provide all the practical equipment remote workers need at the touch of a button. Firstbase takes care of everything as a monthly subscription per worker, including delivery, upgrades, maintenance, repairs, and collections when a worker leaves. We help you:

• Be more cost-efficient
• Comply with regulation
• Save time on onboarding
• Slash your real-estate costs

Sign up for a demo of our platform here