I have operated within large teams for the past 15 years, I can tell you that communication is key to being productive. With HCSS Support, I have seen every iteration of internal communication to keep our teams thinking the same thing. I wanted to share a couple of free options that are accessible to you in case you need to communicate with your team remotely, and you’re tired of reading through long e-mail chains.

Slack: Slack was designed by WordPress creator, Matt Mullenweg, to help his teams of hundreds of developers, admins, and happiness engineers (that all work remotely) to support clients, manage large projects, and transfer media (PDFs, images, etc.). This is a great option for a small company, and the chats are searchable. The problem we encountered with slack was that the per-user subscription cost was very high once you get too active in chats for the free subscription. We were very chatty in support. If you don’t upgrade, they will just begin to remove some historical chats including media.

Google Chat: This is the current solution at HCSS. We have chat rooms for almost size task, and anyone can start a group chat room. For power Google users, this is going to be your easiest solution. For those that do not have business accounts, the hangouts.google.com options is still here until they disable it in the future.

Others to consider:

• Chanty – https://chanty.com
• Fleep – https://fleep.io/
• Flock – https://flock.com/
• Microsoft Teams – https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams

Our Marketing team uses a free Task Organization tool to help manage team to-do lists called Clickup.com