5 Apps for Remote Teams

It’s 2021 and remote work isn’t just a trend, it’s the new normal. Many remote workers express their desire to continue working from home even after the health regulations loosen and allow offices to reopen. So, really, after one year of working from home, what new apps can you discover? While Slack and Zoom became a stable part of our lives, there are still other apps you can explore to connect and work effectively as a remote team. Here are our top 5 suggestions:

1. Canva

Canva brings design to a new level, allowing beginners to create fresh designs for a variety of purposes, from Instagram stories or LinkedIn posts to company logos. While Canva offers a great number of free features, we’re going to talk about their Pro Plan here. Starting at $11/month, the Pro Plan allows you to create your company’s Brand Kit, which includes the colors, fonts, and logos of your organization. Moreover, your team can design together in real-time and then schedule posts to be published on your social media channels. Canva’s intuitive design and abundant assistance (built-in hints and more extensive explanations on their blog) make it possible for virtually anyone to use the app, unlike many other more professional tools that require experience in design. Canva really is a versatile and flexible tool that combines everything a content marketing team needs to start creating designs from scratch.

2. Miro

Miro is another creative team collaboration application. It can act as a whiteboard for brainstorming ideas for your business, as well as a tool for creating schedules, mindmaps, tables, charts, and much more. With its infinite canvas and real-time collaboration option, Miro serves as space for creativity, ideation, and connection of unique thoughts of your team members. A unique function of this app is meeting facilitation. While most conference apps only have a simple whiteboard and presentation options, Miro brings it all together, enabling smooth, flow-like meetings, workshops, and presentations that easily engage several participants.

3. Donut

One of the most common complaints people have about working remotely is feelings of isolation and loneliness. Not being able to have a short chat with a colleague over a coffee makes it more difficult to get to know people you work with on a more personal level. New employees have it even harder. Without previous connections, it takes courage to reach out to someone new on Slack. For the benefit of their employees’ wellness and productivity, remote work managers need to take the responsibility for bringing people together, now that it doesn’t happen organically. Thankfully, Donut takes that burden off your shoulders. All you need to do to facilitate informal communication within your remote team is to add Donut to Slack. It will do the job of introducing remote workers to each other and facilitate a video call where people can meet and have a virtual coffee.

4. Notion

Notion is a sleek document-sharing app that unites a variety of tools in its intuitive app. A truly versatile tool, Notion allows your team to share and edit documents, assign tasks, create calendars, team wikis, and so much more. Notion is effectively used by teams of all sizes – from small startups to Fortune 500 companies. In addition to its addictive design and endless way of personalizing the pages you create, the app’s team consistently rolls out new functions. It can be used as a Desktop or phone app as well as in your browser, giving you the freedom to see, edit and share pages from anywhere. In case you become overwhelmed by the possibilities, Notion offers a series of videos explaining its features and how to get the most of them. In fact, the application became so popular in the last couple of years that many YouTubers who focus on productivity release their own videos exploring the bountiful features of Notion. So if you haven’t tried Notion yet, prepare yourself for a satisfying work experience!

5. Clockify

Clockify is an easy-to-use time tracking tool for teams. It allows the whole remote team to track the time each individual spends completing a task. Apart from its main function, Clockify also lets your team share a calendar, report on their activities, and see what others are doing. This app creates the sense of accountability and solidarity that exists in the office because while a remote worker might be physically alone in their home office they can still “see” their colleagues working. Moreover, it gives teams’ managers a great way to track productivity, notice issues quickly, and address them at the next meeting.