How’s it going with running your virtual team?

Totally rocking it out, with each team member finding your groove.

Or is it a bit of a chaotic mess, with missed deadlines and miscommunications at times.

You’re not alone.

Running a virtual team has its own challenges, ones that don’t even occur in an office setting.

How do you solve the problem?

Enter Slack – a virtual communications platform designed to enhance team conversations.

Why I love it:

Ease of use: Within two minutes, you can be up and running with your own private, secure Slack workspace. You simply create the workspace and name it, invite your team members, and start posting.

Plus, they have downloadable apps for your computer and mobile device. That’s right, you don’t need to access it in your browser only!

Organization of conversations: Each workspace has different subgroups, called channels, where you can have conversations that are specific to a project or task. You can have a channel for routine admin tasks, weekly team meetings, new program launch – go bananas with the organization!

And, your team members can join and leave channels as needed, which cuts out the noise and keeps them focused and on task (which, let’s be honest, doesn’t always happen with group email threads).

Integration with third-party apps: According to Slack, there are over 1,000+ apps that you can connect to Slack to enhance your productivity, like Asana, Zoom and Dropbox, but my top is Google Drive. Post a comment with a Google Drive doc and team members can access the Google doc right from Slack. No more reading the note and then having to hunt around Drive for the corresponding file.

Affordable pricing: Slack offers a free option which is more than enough for small teams in my experience, but if you want a few more features, like unlimited third-party app integration or message archiving and priority customer support, the paid plans start at $6.67 per member per month.

Perhaps my most favorite feature is the ability to put a reminder on a member’s comment! For example, if Sally leaves a comment, asking for you to review the latest round of copy for your sales page. You can view the comment, which will mark it as read, and set a reminder for the Slackbot to ping you again in a set number of hours or days, maybe 2 hours or 2 days, and remind you to follow-up and respond back.

Have you used Slack to work with your team? How did you like it? Or if it’s your first time, let me know how you find it in the comments below!

Photo by RawPixel on Unsplash