Medic Mobile is comprised of 90 teammates distributed across 13 countries and spanning 30 cities, covering nearly every time zone! One third of our teammates work remotely, and the rest of our teammates are spread among three offices on three continents. This makes internal communication incredibly important to feeling connected with each other, and to our success as an organization. With an increasing percentage of the global workforce becoming remote, we wanted to share some tips and tricks on how we stay connected. We use quite a few tools to stay in touch! Here are some of our favorites…
Slack – our go-to conversation space at Medic! A majority of our internal conversations are held on Slack. It’s a place for conversations work-related and otherwise. We share files, photos, relevant news articles and engage in conversations essential to our organization. With advanced customization capabilities we were able to customize Medic specific emojis as well as login messages with inspirational quotes from our teammates and our 2018 goals.
Asana – our project and task management platform. We use Asana to create to-do lists, track project timelines, and set up meeting agendas to keep us on track. At the end of team calls, we turn our agenda items into tasks with assignments and due dates in Asana.
Zoom – video conferencing! Because face-to-face contact is, for the most part limited to video chats, it is essential for these platforms to work, and incredibly frustrating when they do not. With only one full team call each quarter, it is imperative that that everyone’s sound is working and that glitches are limited. Zoom is one of the best and most stable conferencing tools that we have found; even when your internet connection cuts out, Zoom will keep your video going!
Salesforce – just last year, we started using Salesforce as a reliable CRM system to organize our data. Salesforce allows us to maintain project records, log conversations with external contacts, and run reports on this information. As Salesforce is highly customizable, we were able to build it out specific to our needs for program and funding management.
Zapier – with so many tools, it gets hard to keep track of everything. We use Zapier for workflow automation! Zapier facilitates a strong remote work structure by connecting our favorite apps and keeping teammates in the loop. So far, we have connected Slack, Salesforce, Gmail, and we’re just getting started…
Notion – our Intranet! With an interface nearly identical to Slack, Notion was an obvious choice for an internal Wiki for our team. As it is a highly flexible application, we use Notion to custom-build pages containing relevant information to teammates across our organization, with everything from handbooks, to organizational charts, to commonly used internal acronyms.
World Time Buddy – a time zone converter is key for distributed teams! No one wants to be sent a request to join a call scheduled for 4am in their timezone. Scheduling meetings gets confusing when four teammates you need to contact are spread across four entirely different time zones. While that full team call may not occur at convenient time for everyone – World Time Buddy gets us as close as possible!
As a nonprofit organization, while these tools are critical to keeping the wheels turning we have limited resources set aside for external software and we thank Notion, Zapier, Slack and Asana for their generous software donations in support of our mission!