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Ask HN: What tools are game changers for communication in fully remote teams?

21 points by ammar_x ↗ HN
I work at fully remote company. We do a lot of meetings. In those meetings, people go on and on talking about complicated workflows and technical discussions. However, I'm sure most of the others don't follow completely. Voice quality is sometimes bad. I'm sure people who work fully remote can list additional problems.

In physical offices, we have whiteboards that help us explain and keep others' attention, we have facial expressions that help us know when people have difficulties understanding, etc.

So have you discovered a tool or a way to significantly improve communication when working with a fully remote team? If so, please share your experience.

17 comments

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bdavis__
the telephone. with a wire. the one that has been around for a century.

call some one, talk about a specific topic. maybe e-mail a document before or after. on the phone you are not distracted by the notifications and the emoji's, you focus on the topic at hand.

ammar_x
I got your point. Yes, telephone calls would eliminate distractions but it lacks a lot of necessary features. Sharing screen is a must in our company. Also no whiteboard alternative. And we have many non-native English speakers so voice only might not be enough to always understand what they're saying.

I think a telephone call might be good for a few cases but in our case (technology/marketing company,) I don't think it's a good way to communicate remotely.

spicybright
What line of work are you in where you don't need screen sharing? Most of my meetings are audio only with screen share. I'm in software development.
Graffur
Voice calls are overrated. Plus it soon leads to multi-party voice calls and then multi-party video calls. If you've worked from home for the last 2 years you'll know how awful they are.
thindjinn
honestly yac.com has been huge for our team.

voice first, async comms. automatic transcriptions. automatically tags team members mentioned by voice. and they're absolutely meticulous about getting feedback from customers.

ammar_x
Seems like Slack with its new features except for automatic transcriptions and tagging which are useful features of course but I don't see the team switching from Slack to YAC for just these features.

Also, they say it is to replace meetings and I don't think so. Many times you need to meet instead of countless back-and-forth messages.

jdlshore
Miro (miro.com) or a similar virtual whiteboard.

Gather (gather.town) looks very promising as a tool for physicalized interactions, although I haven’t had a chance to use it for real yet.

Meeting formats that aren’t just people taking turns talking, but instead involve breaking up into small groups (Gather or breakout rooms) and collaboratively manipulating shared representations (Miro, Google Docs, Figma, Tuple).

ammar_x
I've used Miro before for mind maps but after your suggestion, I think it's great as a whiteboard, thanks.

Gather looks fun but I'm afraid it will make you more prone to interruptions and therefore have less focus time. For me, I think it would be stressful to be in a situation like that.

> collaboratively manipulating shared representations

Thanks, I would think this is key to enhance meeting quality.

jdlshore
You don’t have to be logged into Gather all the time, just for the time when you’re in the meeting. It’s effectively a better way of breaking into small groups that’s more fluid and natural than breakout rooms.
muzani
We use Gather, but it messes with hotkeys on my PC and slows down build times, so it's not practical unless you have a second computer for it.
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo
Miro gets abused and is designed to easily get abused on so many levels and most of the time is the pinnacle of performative work with PMs trying to make the board look good instead of providing information. I really hate it, it covers up so many misstakes and misinformation.
gtvwill
The entire ms365 e5 suite. Monitoring, Comms, compliance, calendar. All in one.
SigmundA
Yep the same, Teams gets a lot of somewhat well deserved flack around here, but with Covid we went full remote and had just transitioned our phones and company chat to Teams and had move Exchange Email over a while back and it honestly just worked and is a one stop app for company communication. The benefits merging of phones, email, chat, conference, screen share, collaborative office suite, file sharing, calendaring cannot be understated.

There are better individual products but the combined package is what makes it. Also most of our clients seem to be using it too, so holding cross company meetings has been much easier as well.

tmaly
MS Teams has been great, especially the screen sharing.

I think always having an agenda attached to a meeting and sending that out in advance really helps.

Documenting the outcome of meetings and action items where everyone on the call can see them is super helpful.

smarri
I've thoroughly enjoyed VR meetings, but I'm not sure yet if it's a novelty or if there is a future here. I can also vouch for Miro like others have said.
marcind
Our team has developed https://sharetheboard.com

The app digitizes handwritten content in real time, making it an excellent way to share a real whiteboard (or other surface) with remote teams. Remote participants can contribute digital content and the combined contents can be then shared/saved as needed.

There are many excellent digital-first tools out there but our goal was to bring some more reality back to our shared remote experience. There are some tasks that are simply better served by analog tools. Integrations with many existing apps are forthcoming; you can think of STB as a connector of digital/analog content.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo
pitch.com changed the way we do collobarative presentations and was really well received from CEO to Intern because of the ease of use.