Better communication at work is the answer. Ok, maybe not THE answer… but it’s close. Fact is, it’s almost always step number one when addressing persistent issues that hold you back, as well as what helps you move from good to great. Better communication increases understanding, fosters trust, and stands out as the essential ingredient for getting things done. It’s not a silver bullet, it’s silver buckshot.

We decided to make Mattermost a remote-first company for several reasons. For example, employees don’t have to waste time commuting, we are able to hire from a wider talent pool of self-motivated individuals, and we have coverage in all time zones, which helps us respond to our customers around the world more effectively. And since we’re a remote company building collaboration software, we have plenty of opportunity to dogfood our own product.

Teams is Microsoft’s versatile chat and collaboration solution for enterprise communication. Teams come bundled with Office365, offering chat, file sharing, and a host of other collaborative features. The platform also integrates with a host of popular project management applications, chatbots, and alert management platform makes it a hot favorite of production teams.

Earlier this week, our organization made a big decision. From Monday to Tuesday, Axosoft transitioned from being an in-person company to an entirely remote-based workforce overnight. Our organization’s leadership determined this to be a necessary and preemptive measure in our efforts to minimize effects of the CoronaVirus Pandemic and how it affects our team members. Starting tomorrow, my company, Axosoft, is going all remote until further notice.

If you think of it in terms of Tuckman’s stages of team development, suddenly shifting to remote en masse throws your team into “storming” mode. Confusion and frustration abound, and everything feels twice as hard as it should. (We know because we’ve been there.) Your goal right now is to get back to the “performing” stage and resume your regularly-scheduled level of productivity. Here are five ways to do that.

Shadow IT – tech used in an organization that is not administered by that organization’s IT department – accounts for the majority of the cloud tech at most companies. Understandably, the risk this implies might keep a security pro up at night; Gartner estimated in 2016 that by 2020, a third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises will be on their shadow IT resources.