50% of those reading this work remotely. 50% of those working remotely are travelers backpacking from Brazil to Vietnam by day and are coders/developers/marketers by night.
The Hacker Noon Team works remotely too. We've got people in the United States, Germany, The Netherlands, Ukraine, Vietnam, and India. Therefore, we know a thing or two about remote work, its benefits, its pitfalls, and how to get over these pitfalls.
As a remote team, you'll always be tempted to install that "new tool" which promises to "enhance productivity by 30%". In our experience, getting the entire team to unlearn and relearn takes a huge chunk of your time that could be better spent doing what technology companies do all the time - firefighting.
Coming back, here are some of our learnings at Hacker Noon on remote working and how to get better at it.
✳️ There is NO One Tool To Rule Them All
Although the sales guys at Hubspot, Zoho, Freshdesk and their ilk call their products as the one-stop-shop for CRM, more often than not, you'll be using them solely for lead and user-complaint management. Drip campaigns are a breeze with such CRM tools and you can look into getting one of these solutions just for the above-mentioned features.
Hubspot even has a 90% discount plan for startups which scales down to 50% at the end of the first year. (Disclaimer: Hacker Noon is a Hubspot customer.) Zoho is a viable competitor to the Google Suite if, for some reason, you're not okay with Google robots reading your stuff. The Freshdesk suite is a mixture of Hubspot and Mailchimp (an email sending tool) and has a nice GUI interface for managing automation workflows and drip email campaigns. (Disclaimer: You're receiving this newsletter via Mailchimp).
So, check your use case before investing in a CRM tool. If all that you're looking for is templatized responses, you'd be better served by this Gmail extension.
✳️ Slack is a no-brainer
...because getting accustomed to Slack is a no-brainer.
If you're a remote team, you're probably already using Slack for intra-team communications while being able to segment messages into #channels, send messages to groups of people, and above all, integrate via webhooks with a lot of other tools. For example, when one of you purchases a Brand As Author credit at Hacker Noon, the Stripe integration webhook sends an automated notification to the Sales Team. The Dev team does something similar with the Trello integration webhook.
This is really helpful for remote teams since channels enable team members to view their notifications during their work hours without the fear of the notifications getting drowned out like emails. As a remote team, you want to foster team building and the built-in #random channel does just that.
Here's a peek into the Hacker Noon #randon channel on Slack
What we're trying to get at is that team-bonding is essential for remote teams and not a luxury. The teams that are ready to sink together always end up swimming together.
✳️ Make Zaps Not War
Whatever tools you're using, there's a very high chance that there is a Zapier Zap to automate the repetitive sub-tasks of your task. At Hacker Noon, we need to take contact information from marketing forms, add it as a lead in Hubspot, send them an email, calculate its deal size, and add it to a spreadsheet. That 5 steps and you can create a 5-step Zap on Zapier in under 5 minutes.
This helps create a spreadsheet as the 'Master Sheet' and you can share it with the rest of the team without having to share multiple-accesses with multiple people.
If you're not already using Zapier, you're missing out on saving those precious hours from repetitive work. Plus, Zapier itself is a remote team and is well-versed with the issue that we might face.
✳️ Frickin Inbox Zero
Some of us are really organized and can't understand why the rest of us struggle with our inboxes. I'm that rest of us. A lot of you are that rest of us. We need help and there's no shame in asking for it if it helps you NOT miss that important meeting invitation. Trust me, you do not want to miss meetings where everybody across different timezones has bandied together while you're oblivious.
While there are tools like Spike, Spark, Kanban Email and even good 'ol Gmail/Outlook, you need more. There's this new one called Superhuman and its been making the right noise IMO. Unfortunately, they're invite-only at the moment.
I use a free Gmail extension called sortd which allows me to categorize emails not by labels but by their stages. It also has a one-click set up for reminders to followup which those of you who struggle to hit inbox zero will find to be heaven-sent.
✳️ What Should I Takeaway from This?
We've tried to cover the essential tools for collaboration between remote colleagues but there exists an ocean of information that obviously is out of scope for this newsletter. However, we've partnered with Heroku to lend us their Senior Director, Francis Lacoste, to answer your questions in the next Hacker Noon AMA.
He champions remote work at Heroku and Salesforce and is better suited to answer your questions and clear your doubts regarding remote working.
Or simply reply to this email with your question. We'll post it on your behalf.
You can also ask your questions on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram using the hashtag #HackernoonAMA to identify it. We'll post it on your behalf and get back to you with your answer.
Before you leave, check out some awesome stories on remote working, its potential and its application by Hacker Noon contributors.
