Two all-remote software companies share their best practices for connecting with colleagues while respecting work-life balance

If you’re used to working in a bustling office, you might find the newfound silence of remote work deafening. On the other hand, if you’re sheltering in place with a house full of family or roommates, you might be looking for a little help tuning out. Thankfully there’s a quick and social distancing-approved solution to both scenarios: music! Various studies have shown music’s power to lift your mood and help you maintain focus—two things many of us could use right now.

Though the world is going through some pretty dramatic changes, Zendesk and our ecosystem of partners are here to help with tools to keep your business moving forward.

As a remote-first company, we bring employees and members of our community together once a year at our offsite event, which is called MatterCon. MatterCon isn’t your run-of-the-mill conference—it’s more of a meeting of the minds where we’re encouraged to get to know the people we work with, share ideas with each other, and create together.

Messaging helps people foster strong relationships with their family and friends. Now messaging platforms are open for business. Conversational business comprises the different ways messaging channels can be used in support, marketing, sales, and beyond. Customers, shoppers, prospects and leads want to communicate with businesses with the same ease and convenience that they experience when talking to their friends and family.

We all know that knowledge is power. Having a colleague around, whose shoulder we could tap on and ask for help, is also something that is very powerful. However, the whole tap on the shoulder for help option hasn’t been available since most of us shifted to a work-from-home setup – the best alternative we have is reaching out to a teammate on our internal collaboration tools.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, work from home has become a norm and remote collaboration software has become more important than ever. In fact, due to the coronavirus outbreak, a vast number of employees are working from home for the first time - which can be daunting for the unversed. And it can be even more complicated if you don’t know the right tools. Fortunately, we live in a world where remote collaboration can be as effective as face-to-face interaction.

Struggling to manage your virtual team? There are many advantages to hiring remote workers — but only if you’re prepared enough to overcome the challenges of virtual teams. However, with the sudden COVID-19 outbreak, most teams aren’t prepared to deal with virtual work immediately. This is why we’ve decided to cover the 7 biggest challenges of virtual teams and cover how you can deal with them!

The vast majority of web applications should start life as a Majestic Monolith: A single codebase that does everything the application needs to do. This is in contrast to a constellation of services, whether micro or macro, that tries to carve up the application into little islands each doing a piece of the overall work. And the vast majority of web applications will continue to be served well by The Majestic Monolith for their entire lifespan.

How Slack is helping customers thrive during an unprecedented time of remote work