.png){kind=small}
Smartsheets discovered that 75% of all office workers feel less connected to their teams when working from home. We’ve all felt it: working remotely makes it harder to communicate effectively.
Thankfully, each day sees new apps and products being built to help teams connect and accomplish more. Here are 5 products we’ve recently discovered and enjoyed:
Discord
Discord has been around for a while and is effectively Slack on drugs. In addition to having pretty much the same chat capabilities as Slack with direct, group and channel messages, you can also jump on in the same audio & video room allowing to instantly speak and see each other without having to jump on a Hangout or Zoom call. You can share your live screen and even the music you’re listening to on Shopify.
Teemyco
Teemyco is the virtual office for remote teams. You set up virtual rooms to reflect the usual office areas to create a similar office vibe: the conference room, the kitchen, the engineering corner, etc. You can then join a virtual room to instantly chat and interact over audio & video with the people in this room, to collaborate on specific work or catch-up during a coffee break.
Loom
Loom is perfect to record screen-sharing videos with your face being displayed in a little corner to make it more personable. It works perfectly for product demos but also for remote teams sending pre-recorded messages involving some kind of presentation (e.g. Company Monthly Update) – it beats the boring email.
Around
The truth is we haven’t tried Around yet but we’ve very excited in using it once it is released to the public. Around is next-gen video calling – a bit like a live Loom – you see your entire screen and the people you’re having a call with are in these little friendly circles with the camera frame locking onto their faces. It has an auto-mute system to suppress any background noises as well as any echo for people in the same room.
Timezone
Timezone solves a simple problem for global remote teams: having to keep track of the different timezones of the people you work with. Set it up once and it’ll instantly show you the local time for each team member based on their location. We just wish Timezone integrates with all our tools now.
That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this list. And if you’re like me and spend a lot of time in calls and meetings, check out our app Meetric to help you record and track decisions & actions decided in meetings.
