A panel on making remote work less chaotic by properly configuring Slack, Zoom, and Google Workspace. Tuning notifications prevents overload, integrating tools like routing meeting invites into Slack smooths workflow, and custom automation fills gaps when off-the-shelf products don't fit.
What are some of the tools that you guys use to make remote work work?
I've had a lot of conversations recently with our clients because You know, it kind of comes back to, okay, we're a software shop, but in the end, it's really sort of like we're this tech-forward go-to-market company that's going to kind of get into your business and figure out what the best ways are to really succeed in business, to make you productive and make your employees be more human and less computing.
Cause that's really the whole goal. And a lot of those conversations have been around, well, you know what, we threw Zoom at this, we threw Slack at this, we We put all these tools in place and we thought it was gonna be great. And it's just like a, there's just a mess.
We made a mess of everything.
And the funny thing is that even when you get an off-the-shelf tool, like I'm gonna advocate for don't reinvent the wheel.
Sometimes you need custom. That's what keeps us in business.
The things that I know we wanna talk about is internal automation and some of that low-code or coded things that will strap some of those things together or replace those things. But let's talk off the shelf for right now.
But the, the whole point of that off the shelf being valuable is that even the off the shelf is going to require some configuration. And so what happens is even though we're not a vendor of off the shelf software, we wind up doing a lot of, well, have you looked at your Slack notifications and tried to turn the dials a little bit?
Maybe you don't need to be you know, notified of every channel in your entire workspace. I got a lot of COO types who were thinking, I just stopped signing on to Slack because I was getting notifications.
You can change that.
There's a lot of that that goes on.
So the off-the-shelf stuff that we have really, really, really latched onto—
there's a lot of sort of the really specific dev stuff, which I can kind of skip over, but Slack has been huge. Zoom is really big. We're a G Suite, or now it's Google Workplace company, so We've got a lot of those integrations built in.
So when you get invited to a meeting, you can kind of see that come through on Slack. When someone comments on something on a Google Doc, that comes through on Slack.
There's the Einstein sort of quote of, "As few as you can get away with, but as many as you need." Like, that's the paraphrasing.
I don't want to use a ton of tools, but if whatever tools I actually need, let me make sure they're working together.
