Now, in the last year, everyone during the lockdown has had to work from home. But for a lot of people, they just kind of installed Zoom and kept working the same way they have always been working. Some people do tasks via email, some people do tasks on chat, some businesses have WhatsApp groups with their staff, and people are putting voice notes in there.
It’s just like the worst productivity ever. It just scares the absolute crap out of us. So show you some of the most basic tools that you and other team members inside your business can use to keep productive.
1. Asana
Getting right with a remote team is a task. A tool called a sauna, helps us keep everything on the same page with our tasks. This is it’s so underrated to get tasks correct in a business because what most business owners do particularly if you are one of the creative types, is you imagine a vision of something that you want to happen. Then you just kind of like to share it in a meeting once. In your mind, it’s already done. It’s already created. You know, you check in on it three weeks later, when you remember it and it hasn’t been done and you go shit, why hasn’t it been done.
It’s because you didn’t correctly delegate it to someone to get that task done. Now, sometimes for some of us that are a bit more diligent, we might you know, write it up on a whiteboard, or maybe we’ll put it in an email or a chat message, we’ll ask someone to do it in writing. Depending on that person’s level of diligence, how they do tasks, or how they do projects, it may or may not get done. That all works fine when you’ve got a small team maybe got one or two or three people.
Everyone gets to check in on their tasks simply with done, not done, or in progress. So having a simple task system means that everyone is going to be on the same page. Now, why would you do this, instead of using something like a spreadsheet, or a Google Doc some of the features of using a task system like Asana or the fact that you can put in things like due dates, you can have subtasks, can set up, you know, one project with particular milestones or deadlines. Some of the amazing paid features have things like custom fields and deep integration with other apps. You can set up automation and rules that go through automatically all kinds of cool stuff that you can do with a system like a sauna.
2. Google Meet
Google Meet is keeping connected to your team. Most people use Zoom for a lot of their work. Google meeet or one of the reasons that Google Meat is because it runs in the browser. It just works well. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t have to reload every time you open a room. It’s a single app that just works each time and you don’t have to worry about updating to the latest version. If you record a meeting, you don’t have to worry about it rendering and slowing down your computer while you then wait for it to upload. Google Meet has a bunch of advantages over Zoom. All kinds of great new features are built into Google Meet that you don’t have to reach for Zoom anymore.
3. Google Chat
We use this instead of Slack, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, as other business owners use it because of the deep integration with the rest of the Google ecosystem. This sits right inside of my Gmail, it’s got all these cool AI features where it can automatically add responses and things like that in there, bots and add-ons that can have messages automatically populate inside Google Chat, by default from third-party apps.
Google Chat for everything that it’s integrated with. There’s also an amazing integration with Google Calendar, which means that you can set up a meeting, and it will automatically look at everyone’s calendar availability, and schedule that meeting for you right from within a chat. One of those is having a water cooler chat thread. That all happens inside of Google Chat where people can goof around, post memes, post videos, post funny things that they find on the internet, and have, you know, the cuff, kind of chit-chat that keeps teams connected. Google Chat for this because it’s a way of feeling like we’re in the same place. Even though we’re all working in different locations.
4. Google Drive
Google Drive, and specifically, the shared drives features of Google Drive. Now, if you’ve been using Google Drive for a long time, and you’re still on the basic plan, which is now called Starter on Google Workspace, shared, To be honest, most of us are doing a lot of our work in Google Docs these days, which all run in the Google Chrome browser anyway. Drives and shared drives act a little bit like a company server, which we used to have, in the old days when we had the local infrastructure and Microsoft servers in our businesses, it allows the company to control the files that sit there. If you’ve used Gmail and Google Drive in your personal consumer Gmail account, maybe you haven’t switched to a Google Workspace business account yet.
Maybe you’re still sharing files out of your drive. those files and folders aren’t safe. If you’ve created a file, you’re the owner of the file, and that’s fine for you. But if you’re working with someone outside the business, like maybe a contractor or an assistant who is external to your business, and they create a file, and pop it into one of the folders that you own, inside your drive if they created the file, they own that file, and that means that they can delete that file on you. Using Google shared drives inside of Google Drive means that you have corporate control over all of those files.
5. Dialpad
Now, many business owners, unfortunately, still do business using their mobile phones. Start using an amazing tool that is called Dialpad and dial pad is an app that gives you a business phone number that comes with you everywhere you go. Dialpad works on the mobile, it works on your desktop computer as well. It’s a fully-fledged business phone system for you and your team, which works across all of your different devices. The most amazing thing about Dialpad is it doesn’t require any service at all. It’s all completely cloud-hosted. You can do cool things like switch calls between your computer and your mobile phone.
The other great thing about Google Drive and using that for all of your storage is how it stores files. If you’ve used Dropbox, or if you’ve used Microsoft OneDrive in the past, you’ll know that they can get a bit cumbersome, especially when you have lots of files sitting in there, because they’re all being synchronized down to your computer. It starts to kind of like fill up your hard drive, right? So with what was called Google Drive File Stream, it’s now just called Google Drive for desktop, Google will automatically synchronize only what’s needed down to your desktop. So you can call as many people as you’d like for as long as you like. But you also have the portability of the mobile phone. If you’re interested in that, you want your whole team to have one phone number to dial out from. So you’ve got nice consistency in your branding to your customers.
The Google Ecosystem
Everything works seamlessly together and in perfect harmony. If you want to implore you to bring everything into one bring everything into the simplicity of a simple system. That’s the simplicity of Google’s workspace. A Google Workspace is one collaborated set of apps and services, which allow you to get work done in a googly way.