Startups Stack Exchange Archive

Keeping the international team connected

I’ve just started a tech business and most of the people I’ve employed (purely because of talent) are international.

What’s the best way to keep in touch when we are not Skype calling each other?

Are there specific tools that work better than others for globally distributed remote teams? We are only using email and Skype at the moment with a bit of Facebook too but not all team members have Facebook which makes it difficult.

Edit: I don’t want a list of tools. I want to know from your experience why the tools works well and how it helped you get better connected.

Answer 3606

One word: Slack.

It’s a bit like IRC, in better.

Seriously. Just get Slack.

And then, use the likes of Trello, Asana, or any other similar tool to manage your tasks.

Oh, and do pop over to Zapier as well, for a whole bunch of other useful integrations. And Segment.

Answer 3607

My team uses Hipchat. Platforms are available for Mobile (iOS, Android, Windows), as well as Linux, OSX, and Windows operating systems. Not to mention a web browser application.

I use it directly in line with Atlassian’s other main service, JIRA (most ideal for software startups) Agile. When we increase our budget we’re interested in using Confluence, their marketing system.

I think it trumps Slack in the fact that it’s generally cheaper and easier to use. However, for larger companies, Slack quickly takes the prize with all of its integration capacities (Github, Dropbox etc.), as well as a long list of pretty new features.


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