With a likely recession right around the corner, now’s the best time to refresh your tech stack to create a culture of resilience in your company.

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To thrive in spite of changing circumstances, you need adaptability, but you also need the tools to aid the transition. With the right tools and systems, you can maintain strong communication lines, monitor employee performance, and share information quickly between teams and departments through transitional moments.

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Communication 

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When times are tough, there can be a heavy strain on your communication lines.

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With the rapid transfer of information, both in real time and asynchronously, it’s imperative that you have reliable systems of communication. 

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The worst thing that can happen in the face of changing circumstances is to lose access to important files or information, or experience breakdowns in internal communication.

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There are two main types of communication you’ll need to make sure you have covered in your tech stack refresh: synchronous and asynchronous.

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Synchronous 

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Synchronous communication refers to real-time interactions, and is important for relaying information fast, and in detail.

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If you have a lot of context-specific information to share with your team, and it would be easier to communicate it verbally than through the written word, synchronous communication is the way to go.

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Here are some tech stack tools that can help you with real-time interactions:

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Video Conferencing

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Zoom grew a huge user base during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s easy to see why - it replaced in-person meetings.

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For the start of a major project, or a new brief on an existing project, holding a video meeting is often the best option in a remote work environment. You can share context up front, and since it’s a live interaction, you can field questions from team members there and then.

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Live Chat

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Live chat and messaging can be useful not only for retrieving information from team members quickly, but also for customer-facing communication.

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Chatbots can take the place of customer service agents in this aspect, and deliver high-quality customer support in real-time. This can help you cut costs and reallocate your resources elsewhere - an important process for getting through uncertain economic times.

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Asynchronous

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Asynchronous communication is the lifeblood of many remote-first companies, as it enables team members from different departments to stay up to date on various projects regardless of timezone or work schedules.

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Here are some essential asynchronous tech tools to add to your stack:

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Video Recordings

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Software like Loom allows you to record a short video for your team, so they can view it at their earliest convenience.

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Like with Zoom, Loom lets you add as much context as necessary to your messages or even walk team members through a document, website, or process. Yet the difference here is that team members don’t have to be present, so there’s minimal disruption to workflow.

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Project Management Chat

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Most project time tracking software have built-in asynchronous communication.

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What this means is that team members can coordinate on various aspects of tasks and projects with labels, comments, and tags.

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That way, you can have several different departments work together harmoniously on a project. Each team member can be tagged when their input is required, and comments and labels help provide guidance on what needs to be done.

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Information Sharing 

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Chat channels and video conferencing can be useful for providing context on projects and briefing team members, but they aren’t ideal for sharing files or documents.

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File Storage

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For storing a large number of files on a company, department, or team level, cloud storage can be the best option.

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A tool like Dropbox allows you to keep as many files as you need in one place, and you can then use permission access to protect sensitive data.

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That way, rather than physical or virtual file cabinets, you can organize and categorize all relevant company information in a single online place for simple retrieval.

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Knowledge Bases

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Knowledge bases provide you with a way of storing evergreen and updated content that team members and new recruits might need to access on a project-by-project basis.

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When you’re onboarding new hires, you want to point them to a single place for all the information they’ll need, including login details, onboarding processes, and company values and guidelines. With a knowledge base, you can centralize all that information and update it as and when you need to. 

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Live Document Editing

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Most companies work with some form of documents or virtual assets on a regular basis.

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Collaborating on them can be a challenge as without the right tools, team members have to pass them back and forth via email or another medium.

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With a tool like Google Docs, for example, you can eliminate this time-wasting document juggling and edit documents in real time. With multiple collaborators, it’s easy to have several team members jump in and add their input so you can work together in real time.

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Day-to-Day Operations

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Once you’ve refreshed your communication and information-sharing tools, it’s time to turn your attention to the day-to-day operations that keep your wheels turning.

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Customer Relationships

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Managing your relationships with your customer base is one of the most important elements of any customer-facing business.

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Whether it’s the sales department trying to close a deal or the marketing department gathering information on prospective leads, it’s important to use a CRM (customer relationship management) tool to store all relevant customer information.

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The best CRM tools will help you track customer information and use it to identify opportunities for moving leads along your sales funnel.

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Password Management

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Passwords are easily lost at the best of times, and when you have whole teams and departments that need to access software tools, it’s best to come up with a streamlined solution.

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Password management tools can be just that: a way of securely storing passwords so everyone can access software solutions without having to remember login credentials or track them down in documents.

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Employee Monitoring 

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The best employee monitoring tools can support businesses seeking to create a resilient work environment.

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If you’re wondering how to track pc usage in your workforce, and asking, ‘can remote desktop be monitored?’ Insightful has the solution for monitoring computers you’re looking for.

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If you anticipate changing circumstances moving forward - which is inevitable in the world of business - you need a way to reliably track workers and individual productivity before and after the changes take effect.

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With employee monitoring software for Mac Insightful, you can track workday productivity through time data and reports. Using software to see what employees are doing, you can enable a policy of slow productivity and focus on the following:

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• Creating a culture of accountability
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• Reducing the risk of time theft
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• Visualizing workforce performance trends

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