C. Minimise Disruptions and Delays
5. Forums and Social Media
Forums and social media stand out as the best channel for reaching external audiences. Emails, chat, voice and video conferencing, and knowledge bases or wikis are largely for meant for internal communications,
Companies used forums and more recently, social media to create online communities. These tools bring your audience together and allow them to connect with each other. It is also a great place to get feedback and support.
Social media and Forums are actually two very different communication tools. But for a remote company, these two channels can be used for the purpose of engaging with external audiences such as existing customers or potential clients.
Comparison of Features*
Forums |
Social Media |
|---|---|
| Topics and Threads – Post based on a specific topic or reply to people’s posts and create multiple threads to organize discussions. | Newsfeed – Share content from your company page. Followers can view the content you share and react to your post. |
| Anonymity – Make a safe online space by encouraging anonymity in your forum users. | Reputation – Engage with an audience who typically use their real user accounts. |
| Moderation. – Moderate posts and behavior to preserve the sense of community. | Moderation. – Moderation is generally handled by the social media company but you have control over comments made on your page. |
*Note: There are more feature differences between forums and social media but we focused on features relevant for communicating to an external audience.
Top Forum Services:
Flarum, Discourse, MyBB
Top Socila Media Platforms:
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
Ideal for |
Advantages |
Pitfalls |
|---|---|---|
Asynchronous communication with external audience
|
|
|
Tips
- Actively moderate and enforce a code of conduct to maintain a safe space for your online community.
- Organize useful information to make it easier to read and access even for new visitors. As you keep it organized and your audience size increases, it will stay manageable and user-friendly.
- Acknowledge your forum or social media page moderators especially if they keep visitors engaged and contribute to improving customer satisfaction.
6.Specialized Tools
Most of these tools share one thing in common: facilitate collaboration. Though these are domain specific tools, they usually have communication features that they become channels on their own. Some very specific information such as project updates or exchange of ideas are best captured in these applications.
a. Project Management Software
Project management is critical to a team’s success. It involves planning goals, monitoring progress, responding to changes. A lot of tools are available and some even boast custom features for specific projects types. A film project may have different workflows as compared to a software project.
Monday, Asana, Trello
Key Features:
- Kanban boards – Make individual activities and progress visible to the entire team on a virtual workspace
- Task management – Organize tasks, assign deliverables and synchronize deadlines to individual work calendars
- Time tracker – Track the time requirements of tasks, time spent by your team and feed the data to your billing and invoice process.
- Reporting – Compile all information related to schedule, cost, team performance and resources in an easy to share document.
b. Collaborative Design Tools
If people can simultaneously edit a digital output such as document, graphic, presentation, diagram, etc., the tool is considered a collaborative design tool. Because people can access and edit the same file at the same time, it is used for virtual brain-storming and planning sessions.
Collaborative design tools are just as effective even when people contribute asynchronously. Someone can work on an output in the morning and another can review it in the evening. Remote workers that are distributed across different time zones can still work together.
Google Workspace (formerly G-Suite), Miro, Canva
Key Features:
- Synchronous and Asynchronous editing – Collaborate 24/7 whether people are online at the same time or not
- Virtual whiteboard – Share a virtual board space to capture thoughts and ideas either in text or visual form
- Templates – Get started quick with templates of common diagrams used for planning and design
c. Version Control Systems
Real life projects may require multiple people to work in parallel. This is especially true for software development. A version control system like Git emerged as a solution to ensure no conflicts between codes will arise. It stores codes and allows different changes to the same code to be merged safely.
Because requirements often change, it is possible to revert and go back to an older version of the code, if your new update goes bad. While these tools were initially used for source code, essentially anything that is text-based can be stored and managed in a Git repository.
Version Control and Git Repository is a better solution than your old-school manual back-ups.
Github, Gitlab
Key Features:
- Change history – Capture changes made by every user including creation, deletion and edits. Revert back to previous versions as needed.
- Branching and Merging – Keep multiple work independent until you are ready to merge them back together without any conflicts.
- Issue-Tracking – Find and solve problems by clearly defining the task involved and documenting its updates.
* We listed only some of the most basic features
Ideal for |
Advantages |
Pitfalls |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
No single channel or tool will fit all your needs
A combination of the tools is still the most effective form of usage even for one communication event. For example, before an important meeting, you can email the agenda in advance to all participants and use and record the video call for the actual meeting. At a later time, a summary in Google docs can be accessed to help people review key decisions made during the meeting.
The success of the tools are particularly dependent on your team’s ability to understand your specific needs and commitment in practicing best communication practices.
Resources
Try it Out |
Communication Channels and Tools for Remote Work