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

by ammar_x on 1/9/22, 4:23 PM with 17 comments

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.

  • by jdlshore on 1/9/22, 8:22 PM

    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).

  • by bdavis__ on 1/9/22, 7:08 PM

    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.

  • by marcind on 1/11/22, 5:43 PM

    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.

  • by tmaly on 1/10/22, 5:27 PM

    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.

  • by smarri on 1/10/22, 10:17 PM

    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.

  • by YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo on 1/14/22, 9:39 AM

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

  • by gtvwill on 1/9/22, 8:55 PM

    The entire ms365 e5 suite. Monitoring, Comms, compliance, calendar. All in one.

  • by thindjinn on 1/9/22, 7:44 PM

    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.