We work remotely – here’s why and here’s how

Go Tripod is based at Tremough Innovation Centre in Penryn, Cornwall, but our team members work remotely from locations of their choosing. By giving our staff the freedom to create their own environment, they’re able to work smarter and in the way they prefer.

How do we make sure that everyone’s on the same page, providing our clients with the best service we can? We’ve got a suite of tools that help us coordinate and communicate.

Email

It may be seen as old hat but for most companies, including us, email is still a huge part of our operation. It’s often the first point of contact for new enquiries, and it’s an important mechanism for us to keep in contact with our clients.

Slack

We use Slack as our main means of communicating internally. It’s a chat system that allows us to have distinct channels for a variety of different topics and typically we have one for each project. This gives our discussions focus, and allows us to have a history of what’s been said (which is searchable for future reference). If we need to bring in a partner, such as a client or a contractor, then we can invite them to a channel as a guest so we can collaborate more easily.

Teamwork

As a project progresses, we track the outstanding items and the evolution of features using a project management tool called Teamwork. Our clients (you could be one too!) get their own login so they can participate in discussions, provide feedback and help us understand any issues. We can also track our time to invoice accurately, and we can see, at-a-glance, the status of any of our current projects.

Appear.in

No matter how fancy our chatroom and project management tools are, sometimes a phone call is the best way of getting a point across. We’ll often use appear.in to share a screen between the team to demonstrate a new feature or discuss an implementation, but we’ll also use it to let our team catch up. It supports webcams too so we can even look at each other’s ugly mugs!

Yodel.io

Since we spend so much time on Slack, we wondered if we could hook phone calls into it. It turns out we can with Yodel.io. When someone calls our office number, if no-one’s there to pick up, it’ll be routed into Slack where it can be answered in the browser with the press of a button. We can even redirect the call to the correct person’s mobile or send it to a customised voice message if we’re all unavailable.

By using this set of tools we can work more efficiently and deliver better value to our clients. Working remotely is becoming increasingly popular, and at Go Tripod we’ve been remote-working advocates since our formation in 2009. In fact, we think that working remotely enables us to provide a better service. Why not try us out?