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Welcome to the Friday blog

Building a strong remote team takes more than just a powerful internet connection. Effective team management is an art, especially when the team is spread across borders and different time zones. 

Eventually, it all comes down to leadership, navigating remote work communication challenges, and knowing how to operationalize the core processes.

For example, some of the top challenges of most remote teams include:

Employee performance: Setting and following the right KPIs.

Team communication: With a globally distributed team, it’s easy for important messages to fall through the cracks.

Collaboration and task management: Assigning and staying on top of tasks and projects requires the right set of tools in a remote set up.

Workload: it’s crucial to keep remote employee capacity, availability, and overtime in mind to avoid burnout.

Team rapport: Managers need to find ways to ensure that the team members bond well with each other despite the physical distance.

But good news! There are various team collaboration tools, productivity tools, task management software, and status update tools to complete your team management software stack. Use these to add structure to the chaos. Get familiarized with the best practices for remote teams and follow them as much as you can. And of course, use a team management tool mentioned below to build systems and processes for maximum productivity and collaboration.

1. Friday for Team Updates, Goal Setting, Daily Planning & More

How can you keep up with your remote team, even if you’re not working in the same place or at the same time? Friday automates status updates, provides routines and check-ins, and helps teams feel connected while avoiding another meeting. Your team will have a solution that they love to use, while also integrating with your specific tech stack, including team communication, calendars, and project management tools. 

Planner: Start your day knowing exactly what you need to accomplish. Combine all of your calendars, integrate your project management software, add your must-do tasks, and know what your day looks like. 

Automated Work Routines and Stand-Ups: Automate your daily stand-ups and status updates with Friday. Ask questions to your teams, provide weekly CEO updates, and know what your team’s priorities are for the week.  

Power-Ups: Say thanks, track goals, offer ideas for improvement, and connect with icebreaker questions. Power-ups boost your workday to help stay on track--both personally and professionally. 

Friday provides a structure to your team that layers on top of Slack, Teams, and other tools like Trello that you already use. 

Work with your team on goal setting, and then connect your work via your preferred project management tool. 

With the Planner, you can individually plan your day, see your meetings, and the top tasks that you need to complete. 

“Friday gives us a way to ensure that we are aware when things aren’t going as well as we think. We can then action those messages, improving engagement and overall well-being in GoodCall." - Blake Whittman, CEO of GoodCall Recruiting

Free Forever: Daily Planner, Unlimited Routines, Unlimited Users, 3 Week Response History, Kudos and Icebreaker Power-Ups

Pro at $6 per month: Free plan + Unlimited Response history, Advanced Reports, Data export, Premium integrations, Goals Power-Up

Business: Other plans + anonymous workflows, API integrations, Enterprise integrations, Advanced roles, Ideas Power-Up, SSO/SAML, dedicated account manager

Toggl is a time tracking team management software that makes it incredibly easy for you to manage remote teams. You can plan projects, assign tasks, and collaborate effectively with your team across different time zones. It integrates easily with all your popular team management apps such as Slack, Asana, G-Suite, and more.

Easy to track your to-dos--weekly, monthly, yearly

Seamless integration with all the popular apps (Slack, G-Suite, etc.) 

“We use Toggl to track time per customer for ongoing projects. We track actual hours spent on a project compared to the estimated hours for many reasons. This allows us to make intelligent decisions on future bids and allows us to demonstrate to clients how their hours are being spent and the value in those hours.” - TrustRadius

Clockify is a free team time management app with some wonderful features. It helps you track which team member is working on what, track their process and overall productivity level across weeks.

It has a simple interface where you can add unlimited users to unlimited projects. Assign tasks, set timelines, and let your team members track their progress and time spent on each task as they complete their assignments.

One of the key highlights of this tool is its dashboard--as a project lead, you can see the weekly breakdown of your team’s tasks, and know who worked on what and who was most active during the week.

Harvest is an online time tracking and team management software. It’s a great tool for remote teams to track time and generate professional looking invoices. You can use the tool to communicate with your clients and update time/data on your weekly timesheet in a seamless manner.

Track time and share professional-looking timesheets

“It just works. Creating an offer, turning it into an invoice, setting everything up... it just works easy. In contrast with many software you can use for invoicing, Harvest doesn't try to do it all, it just keeps things simple. Probably too simple at times, but I never ran into any issues as we have straightforward product & services lines to add to our invoices.” - Capterra

Asana offers the best of both worlds. It gives you a kanban board and a listview depending on what you prefer. You can either assign your team members to cards (kanban board) or assign tasks (list projects). Whatever option you choose, you get features such as attachments, sub-tasks, labels, descriptions, and comments to add to your tasks

You can also mark certain tasks as milestones, define dependencies, and add deadlines to your tasks. To further enhance team communication, Asana offers a “Conversation” section where you can post updates and discuss the progress of the tasks. It also has a “Files” section that stores all your attachments that are added to the tasks for easy access.

Offers both kanban and list view for task management

Can add milestones, define dependencies, and add deadlines to your tasks for multiple projects

Offers a “Conversation” section to discuss the task

Offers a “Files” section that stores all your attachments for easy access

“What I like the most, when it comes to team collaboration in Asana, is the task assignment function as we can simply assign tasks to each other and combined with Slack integration we immediately get notified about that in Slack as well. That way we really improved task tracking and execution. One thing that I find very useful is that Asana enables both list view and Kanban view, as later is especially appreciated by some of my coworkers.” - Capterra

Premium - $13.49/monthly ($10.99/month if billed annually)

Business - $30.49/monthly ($24.99/month if billed annually)

6. Trello for Project Management Software

Trello is one of the most popular and well-known free project management software solutions. It follows a “cards' ' system in a kanban board. Assign tasks or “cards” and then track their progress as they move their cards to appropriate sections. Trello allows you to set a step-by-step process of how a task is supposed to move from inception to completion.

Your team can create as many columns as they like and make the process as detailed as possible. For example, if you’re launching a marketing campaign, then you can add columns such as “Ideation,” “To-Do,” “Updates,” “Launch,” and “Completed.”

You can organize your projects and cards by adding tags, attaching files, and defining deadlines. Use it as a collaboration tool, and track your progress and also get a comprehensive view of how the work is progressing.

Create a step-by-step process by adding different columns

 Create card checklists for sub-tasks within main tasks

“Out of all the work-related applications that we've tried, Trello is one that has really stuck. We're huge Trello users and I love it's easy to use interface. The best thing about Trello is how it's structured - mainly incorporating boards and cards as the foundation of its system. The raw simplicity of creating cards and dragging them across boards to indicate progress is a brilliant way to organize work. On top of this, Trello comes with a giant array of add-ons and extra features (paid and free) that are designed to help users with various tasks.” - G2

Business Class - $12.50/month ($9.99/month if billed annually)

Enterprise - $17.50 per month for 100 users

7. ClickUp for Project Management Software

ClickUp is one of the popular team management apps for productivity and project management. It helps remote teams manage workflow in a more efficient and collaborative manner. It offers all the important features to enhance productivity such as task management, project/time tracking, Gantt charts, collaboration, recurring tasks, and more.

A great productivity and team management software

“ClickUp is awesome! I don’t know how I worked without it before. If you have a small team, ClickUp is the best way to collaborate on large and small projects. The free version is excellent and offers everything you need. If you are a larger company, you may go to upgrade for additional features, but regardless you will be satisfied because it’s a life-saving software for my team.” - TrustRadius

Slack is a real-time mobile and desktop app that helps you streamline team communication. You can create private and public channels, send direct messages, files, plan and discuss your projects in a seamless way. 

Our picks for the best team management software tools. Improve your productivity, get status updates, and check tasks with this team management tech stack.

Team Management Software Tools: The 15 Best for Your Business

15 Best Team Management Software Tools

How much time does your organization spend on team meetings?“Not too much,” you may think. Perhaps you re-group once per week for about an hour to share important updates and discuss future plans. That seems like a reasonable ask: one hour a week, 52 hours a year. But when you consider the time each employee spends on preparing presentations, attending meetings in sub-groups to plan for the staff meeting, putting together a meeting agenda, and other related action items, the numbers can really add up. One study published in the Harvard Business Review showed that a single weekly executive committee meeting at a large company took up 300,000 hours of time each year!  

There’s no doubt that team meetings are important. But how can you have more effective team meetings?

Sometimes, there’s no substitute for face-to-face communication-for example, studies have shown that requests made face-to-face can be up to 34 times more effective than those made via email. 

Meetings allow you to communicate ideas quickly and build feelings of camaraderie in your team. However, needlessly long or poorly-organized team meetings can cost your company time and money. It’s important to make sure you have an effective plan covering when, why, and how your team needs to meet.  

In this post, you’ll learn the value of team meetings, how to manage your time well, and how Friday can help you. 

It’s hard to imagine a company that never has a single meeting. While some companies have gone so far as to make all meetings optional, it’s rare that they get rid of them entirely. That’s because effective team meetings have a purpose. Some things you can accomplish in meetings would take a lot longer to do via email. If you’re working on a new, highly-collaborative project where the parameters still haven’t been clearly defined, sharing information in person can save time. Meetings also help your team feel like a team. Especially in remote work environments, alienation and isolation can take a toll. If employees are silently getting depressed or seething over workplace issues, they may quit suddenly, or become less able to focus on their work. Seeing each other regularly in person (or via video-conferencing) is a great way to help people feel connected, and make sure any problems are addressed.   

Of course, there are also some drawbacks to team meetings, especially if your meetings frequently run overtime or get off-track.

Rather than bringing your team together, inefficient meetings can be a source of frustration for employees. If most of the meeting is spent sharing basic information, team members might be left thinking “this should have been an email”. If the content is boring or not relevant to everyone present, people are likely to “zone out” and lose their concentration, wasting valuable time during working hours. 

One easy way to make sure your meetings stay on track is to create an agenda beforehand. The agenda should include an opportunity for all team members to talk about their current progress, any issues they’re facing, or other things they’d like to discuss. 

How Friday Can Help You Build Your Team Meeting Agenda

Preparing an agenda can take some time. The team lead will need to gather everyone’s thoughts in a central place, and may need to remind people to contribute to the agenda.

That’s where a solution like Friday.app’s automated agenda creation can be useful. Rather than wasting time contributing to multiple Google Docs and sending out reminders, the agenda-creation process can be fully automated and help you avoid an unproductive meeting.   

1. Focus on Ideation and Relationship-Building

If your meeting is mainly taken up by status updates or sharing facts, this is a surefire sign that it may not be the best use of everyone’s time. What’s so bad about status updates? Simply put, they’re easy to understand and could be dealt with by one line in an email. They also encourage side-discussions during the meeting that may not be relevant to everyone. Instead of presenting easily-understood information in bullet points or asking team members to give a status update, try to orient your meeting towards the types of interactions that are difficult to have over email. These include discussing challenging problems, diving into new projects, or doing team building activities. 

2. Make Sure the Meeting is Relevant to All Participants

Another important point to keep in mind is that the meeting should be relevant to everyone there. If the meeting's purpose is for discussing a coding issue, there’s no need to have the entire team from marketing or accounting present.

Try to narrow down the list of meeting participants as much as possible. You should also create an environment where people feel comfortable leaving if the meeting is no longer relevant to them.   

3. Choose a "Meeting Leader" for a Successful Meeting

It’s useful to have a designated team leader to manage the discussion and keep things on track. Typically, this would be a project manager, team lead, or project lead.

Of course, when choosing a leader, you’ll want to consider their position and involvement in the team. But if you’re running a remote meeting, there’s another factor you should keep in mind-tech-savviness. 

Chris Myers, the CEO of Houston-based recruiting agency Professional Alternatives, recommends designating the person running the video-conferencing call as the meeting leader. “It is helpful if that person is the one to guide the conversation, while allowing attendees to focus on the meeting’s contents... this person should also be aware of how the technology works in order to help others during the meeting.” 

4. Consider Answering Questions by Email, Slack, or in Friday

Often, team meetings tend to include a five- to ten-minute question period at the end. However, there are a few problems with this. The short time allotted is rarely enough to answer everyone’s questions. Moreover, some team members may be wasting time listening to answers that aren’t relevant to them, and if a team member is distracted, they may miss out on important information.

John Ross, CEO of Test Prep Insight, suggests cutting out this Q&A session and replacing it with an email instead. “If team members have any follow up questions, they can email you directly after the meeting. The best approach is then to aggregate all questions in one place, answer them clearly and concisely in an email, and distribute the answer email to all employees that attended.” 

This can be the case for virtual meetings too, especially in the era of Zoom fatigue. Following up by email, Slack, or your team communication software streamlines the process.

How Many People Should Attend the Meeting?

As previously mentioned, you’ll want to make sure the meeting is limited to attendees who really need to be there. It’s easier to communicate in a small meeting than in a large one-if too many people are present, the meeting can end up spiralling off into side discussions.At big companies, it can be difficult to decide who needs to be at a meeting and who doesn’t. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos deals with this challenge using the “two-pizza rule”. Essentially, if two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group, the meeting is probably too large. 

So how many people can two pizzas feed? Well, according to PizzaNeed.com, the average pizza has between 6-12 slices. Assuming that each person eats two slices of pizza, that’s how big your meeting should be: approximately 6-12 people (15 maximum).

How Does Remote Work Affect Team Meetings?

Remote meetings present certain challenges that make them different from in-person meetings. Holding people’s attention is one of these challenges. Remote workers may be working from a home they share with children, spouses, and pets, or from a public space such as a coffee shop. These environments are filled with distractions that don’t exist in the office. Besides this, there are also plenty of digital distractions to contend with, from social media and email to online videos. To combat the influence of these distractions, managers may need to get creative. John Ross of Test Prep Insight offers some suggestions. “Small giveaways mid-meeting, shorter meeting times, [or] allowing guest hosting of the meeting, where you turn the meeting over to a non-team lead... sometimes turning over the controls to one of the team members will grab attention, as peers want to listen in.” 

Michael Alexis, CEO of TeamBuilding, recommends spending 8% of your team meeting (5 minutes for a one-hour meeting) engaged in a virtual activity. “For example, you could do a quick round of icebreaker questions, a high-energy dance party, or play a game like online Bingo. The reason this ‘game time’ is so important is that it helps boost engagement and participation in the rest of the meeting, as well as improving relationships and communication in the long term.” In addition, don’t forget that technical issues may cause delays during remote meetings.

 You’ll want to deal with this contingency beforehand: make sure everyone is well-trained on how to use the meeting software, and have someone on hand to help with troubleshooting. If some team members frequently have problems with their home WiFi, try suggesting that they connect using an Ethernet cable.  

Conclusion: How to Avoid Bad and Ineffective Meetings

Bad team meetings are a serious problem. Besides being a time-suck, they can also be demoralizing and leave team members feeling frustrated. To make sure your team meeting runs smoothly, create an agenda beforehand, designate a meeting leader, and commit to sticking to the time limit. Make sure the meeting stays on track by limiting the number of participants, avoiding side conversations that aren’t relevant to everyone, and keeping people focused with short team building activities or other creative methods. When run efficiently, team meetings can be the glue that holds your team together, even during difficult periods. 

Learn how to have an effective team meeting that will engage your team, cut down on wasted meetings, and value everyone’s time.

How to Have Effective Team Meetings

How To Run Effective Team Meetings: The Good, The Bad, and the Productive

Is your Outlook calendar the source of truth for your workday? At a minimum, it contains the meetings and key events that you need to perform to be effective at work.

For a while, I would scan my calendar in the morning to see what was on my plate for the day. I would review meetings and share my daily agenda with my wife in the morning before the kiddos woke up.

Finally, one day I decided to explore and see if I could receive a daily agenda email that outlined my meetings for the day. It seemed like this was an obvious feature that should be baked directly into all calendar apps, especially something as popular as Microsoft Outlook.

It turns out that this exists! In the rest of this post, I'm going to share how you can configure your daily agenda, but I'm also going to outline the problems I ran into with the default configuration options. Towards the end of this post, I'm going to show you how our daily planner solves these problems and helps you stay focused, on track, and show you exactly what you need to accomplish everyday.

Setting up the default daily agenda email doesn't take very long at all. You need to visit your Outlook calendar settings and click on "view all Outlook settings" in the bottom right corner (see screenshot below):

Then, you need to find the Agenda mail tab, where you can enable the daily agenda mail option (see screenshot below).

After you click to enable the email, you will receive a daily agenda email at 5am in the morning. Why 5am? Apparently that's because Microsoft determined that this was the appropriate time. Or they just copied what Google Calendar does. I'm not quite sure :)

Problems with the default Outlook agenda options

The Outlook agenda email offers a lot of promise, but this feature is neglected and needs to be improved. For example:

I should be able to connect multiple calendar accounts. I wanted to see my work and personal meetings in one email in the morning. This wasn't possible.

The email formatting looks bad. While it displays the meetings, the formatting isn't very great.

My daily agenda is more than meetings -It's great to see meetings, but I want to see everything that's on my plate. Meetings. Tasks. Routines. Times when I need to focus. You get the point :)

At Friday, our mission is to help you do your best work from anywhere, which is why we decided to help you better roadmap your days with a daily planner.

If you signup for a Friday account, you can:

Connect your task apps (Microsoft To Do, Asana, Todoist, Clickup, and others)

We will glue all your daily work in one place. Then, you can configure a daily agenda notification to be sent at a time that makes the most sense for you. Unlike Outlook's default settings, you have complete control!

Additionally, the email we send you in the morning contains a complete view of the most important stuff you need to accomplish for the day. 

Upcoming meetings (pulled from one or many calendars)

If you were curious, here's what a sample email looks like from Friday. We also have the ability to define working hours (i.e. - 9am-5pm), so you can filter out events that fall outside of your workday. This isn't possible with the default Outlook settings.

If you'd like to receive a daily agenda email and have more productive workdays, you should give Friday a try (it's free to get started). The daily planner is one of many tools that we offer to help you stay productive, no matter where you work.

P.S - we also have a chrome extension that helps you visualize your day when you open a new tab. Check it out!

Here's how you can setup a daily agenda notification with Microsoft Outlook. Start your day off right with a daily digest of the work you need to complete, pulled from tools you already use.

Daily Agenda & Microsoft Outlook: how to get setup

How to setup your Daily Agenda with Outlook

The global workspace is changing and rapidly at that. Over the past decade, remote work was gradually picking up pace. People were talking about the perks of being digital nomads, new collaborative tools and technologies allowed for more productive remote work without being under the same roof for 40 hours a week.

The world was embracing this new trend going into 2020 with some companies offering selective “work from home” days. Co-working spaces were popping up everywhere and it was possible to get serious work done from anywhere as long as you had a stable internet connection. 

This change got turbocharged in March 2020 when the world had no other option than to work remotely. Some of the tech giants such as Facebook, Apple, and Twitter embraced this “new normal” and went on to state that work from home is here to stay.

The lockdown, while difficult, had its silver lining where it sensitized most business leaders to identify remote work and get comfortable with it. And the numbers further validate this sentiment--90% of remote workers would recommend working remotely to a friend.

If you’re looking to find companies that understand the best practices for remote teams and also great employee benefits, and a place where you can thrive as a professional in a remote workforce, then keep going to see the full list.

10up is a web design and development consulting service. Be it  digital strategy and management, software engineering, user experience, interactive design, or cloud infrastructure, their team of experts have you covered.

At 10up, you get the freedom to work from wherever you want, a flexible work schedule, equipment allowance, health, dental, and life insurance, paid time off, holidays, and more.

10up has a dozen open positions for designers, developers, accountant, client support, and more. And they use Friday to automate their work routines and goal setting!

Think WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Gravatar, Tumblr. These are world-class products created by fully remote “Automatticians”. Right now, there are over a thousand Automatticians distributed across 77 countries speaking 96 different languages. No matter where you are located, if you’ve got the skills, they’ve got a job for you. As a company, Automattic is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their remote workforce. 

Automattic is currently hiring for over a dozen positions in engineering, design, business development and marketing, people, legal, finance, and more.

Buffer is one of the best social media scheduling tools helping its customers build their brands and grow their businesses on social media. The company started in 2010 and today it has a portfolio of over 73,000 customers including Shopify, Github, Intercom, Basecamp, and more.

Buffer is a fully distributed team of 85 people living and working in 15 countries around the world. They offer health insurance to all their team members (international and US). As an additional bonus, whenever the company does well, all team members share the profits.

Doist is the team behind Todoist, a popular productivity tool that is currently helping more than 22 million people manage their tasks and projects. Todoist has a minimalist design and is available as a web app, desktop app, mobile app, and even a browser extension. 

The company started in 2007. From Jamaica to Poland, Taiwan to Australia, Doist’s team is spread all over the globe. Along with all the other remote benefits, as a Doister, you’ll also get one month per year to spend time working on a work-related project that you’re passionate about.

FlexJobs’ core mission is to help people find remote work from home, and flexible job opportunities that make their lives better. They’ve been fully remote from when they started back in 2007. Remote working at FlexJobs means support for their employees in all aspects of their lives by offering them stipends towards professional development, technology, office furniture, housekeeping, snack subscriptions, and co-working spaces.

Ghost is a non-profit organisation creating free open source software to empower journalism. They’re built a full-stack, modern content management platform to create, publish, and manage content.

Ghost primarily uses Github, Slack, and Zoom to stay connected and build their platform. They offer competitive salary, cover for all the tech support you need, offer unlimited paid vacation days, and close the office on the last Friday of every single month. For remote work, Ghost currently has openings for designers and engineers.

GitLab is a DevOps platform built for the enterprise. They’ve created a community of developers and engineers who share their code and offer tips to one another.

The platform is a great place to share and learn information about version control, CI/CD, DevSecOps, and all-remote workflows.

Gitlab has a fully remote and completely distributed team of more than 1200 members. They believe in asynchronous work which means the team members can contribute from anywhere at any time. Gitlab is currently hiring for over a dozen positions in sales, marketing, engineering, product, and more. 

Hubstaff is a time tracking tool that’s used by over 34,000 businesses. You don’t use Hubstaff to just track time but also to help with automatic payroll processing and attendance scheduling. The distributed company started in 2012 as a way to better manage global remote teams.

They’re a team of driven, talented individuals spread across the world. Hubstaff is currently hiring for developers, engineers, and more.

InVision is helping thousands of companies, including the Fortune 100, and brands such as American Express, Netflix, Ikea use its intuitive tools for ideation, design, prototyping, and design management. Their platform gives you everything you need to design your product digitally.

InVision is a fully remote company with its distributed team in more than 20 countries. The company offers medical insurance, equipment allowances and conference/travel budgets to all its employees. 

Knack is a cloud-based tool that makes it easy for businesses to build applications that manage, share, and empower data. These tools are simple to use and require no coding whatsoever. Today, they have over 4000 customers who’ve built over 100,000 apps.

Knack is a team of 31 members spread across the globe. They offer their workers unlimited paid vacation, paid corporate retreats, health, vision, and dental, covering 75% of the premium for you and your dependents. Knack is currently hiring for a few positions in engineering.

Founded in 2010, Scrapinghub is one of the fastest growing tech businesses that takes web content and turns it into useful data. They offer a cloud-based web crawling platform, off-the-shelf datasets, and turn-key web scraping services.

More than 2,000 companies and over 1M developers use Scrapinghub tools and services to get the data they need from the web. They’re a globally distributed team of over 170 “shrubbers” across 30 countries worldwide. As an employee, you’ll also get the option to enroll in the company’s share program.

Time Doctor offers productivity and time-tracking monitoring software that helps reduce wasted time and increase productive time. The inception of Time Doctor happened in 2012 when Rob Rawson & Liam Martin developed the software. Their goal is to be the most trusted time tracking and productivity app for remote teams.

Today, they have over 85 team members working 100% remotely across 31 countries. Time Doctor is currently looking for people in engineering, marketing, customer relations, and more.

Toggl is one of the simplest time-tracking tools that help teams work better and be more productive from anywhere in the world. They’re a fully remote company, with “Togglers” working from more than 40 countries across the world.

As a Toggler, you’ll have the freedom to choose when and where you work along with a €2,000 budget to buy a laptop and set up your home office. You also get monthly reimbursement for gym membership, massage, and any other wellness service.

Toggl is currently hiring for software development, operations, and marketing.

Toptal is a freelance marketplace that was initially built keeping only tech talent in mind. However, over the years, they’ve expanded their pool to include designers, writers, and more. The company’s USP is that it accepts only 3% or fewer of freelance applicants.

Toptal is one of the largest fully-remote companies. They have a core team with hundreds of members spread across 70+ countries. As a company that connects the world's top talent with the top organizations, Toptal understands what it takes to make a remote team work efficiently. 

Zapier creates workflows called Zaps that connect your apps to automate repetitive tasks, so that you can save time and scale your projects. 

Zapier is a fully remote company with employees in over 28 countries and 17 time zones. As a new employee, you'll start with an immersive remote onboarding experience where you’ll learn about the product, culture, and the business. They offer competitive salary, unlimited vacation policy, among many other benefits. 

Zapier is currently hiring for design, engineering, marketing, partnerships, support, and more. 

Conclusion: Which Remote Company Will You Work For?

Millions of people were already working remotely from home before the COVID-19 pandemic. The global crisis further pushed 88% of business organizations all over the world to adapt to remote working. And the rise of remote work is only beginning. 

If you want to experience the best of remote work, then the 15 companies listed above are a great place to start your job hunt. 

See the companies that are dedicated to a remote work-first environment and company culture.

15 Fully Remote Companies to Work For in 2021

15 Fully Remote Companies To Work For in 2021

If you are like me, your google calendar acts as a central nervous system for your workday. At a minimum, it contains the meetings and key events that you need to perform to be effective at work.

For many years I would start my morning off by looking at my Google Calendar to see what was on my plate for the day. I would review the events and chat about it with my wife while drinking coffee before my young children would wake up and demand our attention.

Finally, one day I decided to explore and see if I could receive a daily agenda email that outlined my meetings for the day. It seemed like this was an obvious feature that should be baked directly into Google Calendar.

It turns out that this exists! In the rest of this post, I'm going to share how you can configure your daily agenda, but I'm also going to outline the problems I ran into with the default options. Towards the end of this post, I'm going to show you how our daily planner solves these problems and helps you stay focused, on track, and know exactly what you need to accomplish everyday.

How to setup the Daily Agenda email for Google Calendar

Setting up the default daily agenda email takes a few minutes. In short, you need to visit Google Calendar and find the settings option for a particular calendar. I've included a screenshot below of the settings option:

Then, you need to find the "other notifications" setting under the calendar option. At the bottom, you should have the option to setup a daily agenda email.

After you click to enable the email, you will receive a daily agenda email at 5am in the morning. Why 5am? Well, that's because Google thought it would be a good idea (or they were copying Outlook's agenda functionality). 

When I first discovered this, I was excited, but it felt like it was missing some configuration options.

Problems with the default agenda settings

The google calendar agenda email offered so much promise, but it became clear that Google didn't spend a lot of time improving this feature. I've included problems that I ran into below:

I was not able to connect multiple calendars. I wanted to see my work and personal meetings in one email in the morning. This wasn't possible.

The email looked terrible. While it displayed the meetings, the formatting was terrible and wasn't easy to read.

My daily agenda is more than meetings - It was great to see my meetings, but what I really wanted was the ability to see all my work for the day. I wanted to see todos, meetings, and maybe a quick snapshot of today's weather in one place.

Connect your calendar (or multiple calendars)

Connect your task apps (Todoist, Asana, Clickup, and others)

We will glue all your daily work in one place. Then, you can configure a daily agenda notification to be sent. Unlike Google Calendar's default settings, you can pick a time that makes the most sense for you.

Additionally, the email we send you in the morning contains a full view of the most important stuff you need to accomplish for the day. We'll show you:

If you were curious, here's what a sample email looks like from Friday. We also have the ability to define working hours (i.e. - 9am-5pm), so you can filter out events that fall outside of your workday.

If you'd like to receive a daily agenda email and have more productive workdays, you should give Friday a try (it's free to get started). We'll glue your work together in one place and help you finish your days with a feeling of accomplishment.

P.S - we also have a chrome extension that helps you stay on track throughout the day. Check it out!

Here's how you can setup a daily agenda with Google Calendar. Start your day off right with a daily digest of the work you need to complete today.

Daily Agenda & Google Calendar: how to get setup

How to setup a daily agenda with Google Calendar

In a previous post, I wrote about the issues with the employee engagement industry. If you haven’t read the post, there are a few major, structural issues outlined below:

Everyone (mostly vendors) defines employee engagement differently, it’s a squishy metric that isn’t tied to the balance sheet.

Employee engagement purportedly drives performance & revenue, when in reality, the exact opposite occurs. Operating at a high-level drives satisfaction.

The engagement market is driven by vendors who have created a system to ensure that they have a consistent demand for their products. They are incentivized to keep EE scores low.

There’s very little innovation in this market, primarily driven by HR organizations who have been trained to avoid taking risks.

In this post, I’m going to present a framework for how I think about improving work performance and subsequently, happiness.

First up, let’s talk about the people we need to make this happen.

First (and most importantly), who is driving the vehicle? Inside the organization, who is prioritizing improving performance/happiness?

Frequently, the notion of measuring engagement falls on the HR department. When I first started Friday, I assumed that the product would be a home-run as one of their responsibilities was to measure “engagement.”

Human resources (by design), is one of the least-risky departments inside the organization. These departments were created to mitigate risk, handling things like compliance and payroll. When people say that HR departments exist to protect the business, they are right! I’d like you to think of this as the “default state” of HR.

With that being said, I’ve experienced empowered HR organizations who are beloved by people inside the organization. What gives?

HR departments are a conduit for the priorities of the leadership team. If the CEO and other CXOs care about creating a great place to work, HR will feel empowered to make this happen.

Learn how to improve employee performance at work. See more in this comprehensive guide.

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