Top 20 'Watercooler-Worthy' Remote Work Tools to master for remote workers fighting isolation in 2025
The year is 2025, and remote work is no longer a temporary experiment—it's a cornerstone of the modern career landscape. We've traded commutes for comfort, and office cubicles for home office nooks. While the benefits are undeniable (hello, pajama-bottomed video calls!), a silent challenge has crept into our professional lives: isolation. The spontaneous chat by the coffee machine, the shared laugh over a silly email, the casual "how was your weekend?"—these are the small moments of connection that weave the fabric of a strong team culture.
Without the physical office, that "watercooler" has vanished. We've become incredibly efficient at transactional communication, but we risk losing the relational glue that makes work meaningful and collaborative. The loneliness is real, and it can lead to burnout, disengagement, and a feeling of being just another avatar on a screen. But what if we could rebuild that watercooler, brick by digital brick?
That's where this list comes in. We're moving beyond the basic "productivity" apps. These are the tools that are 'watercooler-worthy'—platforms and apps designed not just to get the job done, but to foster genuine connection, spark spontaneous conversations, and combat the loneliness of the long-haul remote career. In a recent talk, career strategist Goh Ling Yong emphasized that the future of work isn't just about where you work, but how you connect. Let's dive into the top 20 tools you need to master to thrive, not just survive, in the remote world of 2025.
Communication & Connection: The Virtual Watercooler
These tools are the bedrock of creating a space for the casual, human interactions you're missing.
1. Slack: The Digital HQ
Slack is more than just a chat app; it's the central nervous system for many remote teams. While its channels for work projects are essential, its true power in fighting isolation lies in its non-work channels. This is where your company's personality comes to life.
By creating dedicated spaces for shared interests, you give your team permission to be human. These channels become the new coffee machine, the new lunch table. They are low-stakes environments to share a piece of yourself beyond your job title, fostering friendships that make logging in each day feel less like clocking in and more like joining your friends.
- Pro Tip: Go beyond a generic
#randomchannel. Create specific, interest-based channels like#pet-photos,#binge-watching,#book-club, or#gardening-gurus. Use the Donut app integration (more on that later!) to randomly pair colleagues for virtual coffee chats.
2. Discord: The Community Hub
Originally built for gamers, Discord has evolved into a powerful community-building platform perfect for remote teams. Its standout feature is the persistent voice channels. Unlike a Zoom call that needs to be scheduled, these are "always-on" rooms that team members can drop in and out of.
Imagine a "Co-Working Cafe" voice channel where people can work in companionable silence, occasionally unmuting to ask a quick question. This mimics the energy of an open-plan office without the constant interruptions. It creates a sense of presence and availability that's incredibly difficult to replicate otherwise.
- Pro Tip: Set up different voice channels for different purposes: one for the marketing team to hang out in, a "Silent Library" for deep focus, and a "Lunch Room" for casual midday chats.
3. Gather Town: The Gamified Office
If you truly miss the feeling of "walking" through an office, Gather is your dream come true. It’s a 2D virtual space where you control a pixelated avatar. When your avatar gets close to a colleague's, your video and audio feeds automatically connect. Walk away, and the call ends.
This brilliantly replicates the serendipitous encounters of office life. You can "bump into" a coworker in the virtual hallway, pop by someone's "desk" to ask a quick question, or meet in a conference room for a more formal meeting. It makes interaction intentional but effortless, turning the virtual workspace into a place you want to explore.
- Pro Tip: Customize your Gather space with fun elements like a game room with playable Tetris, a rooftop lounge for virtual happy hours, or "focus zones" where audio doesn't connect.
4. Donut (Slack App): The Connection Automator
Donut is a simple but brilliant app that integrates directly with Slack. Its core function is to randomly pair up team members for informal chats—virtual coffees, lunches, or just 15-minute "get to know you" calls. It takes the awkwardness out of initiating one-on-one connections.
This is especially critical for new hires, who can feel incredibly isolated. Donut can onboard them by introducing them to new people every week. For established teams, it breaks down silos and helps people in different departments build rapport, leading to better cross-functional collaboration.
- Pro Tip: Create different Donut channels for different purposes. One for company-wide coffee chats, another for "engineering-marketing" pairings to foster understanding, and even one for peer-mentoring matches.
Visual Collaboration: The Virtual Whiteboard
These tools bring back the magic of "thinking out loud" together, visually.
5. Miro: The Infinite Whiteboard
Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard that feels limitless. It's the digital equivalent of getting everyone in a room with a huge whiteboard, a stack of sticky notes, and a box of markers. It’s perfect for brainstorming, mind-mapping, and strategic planning.
The magic of Miro is seeing your colleagues' cursors move around the board in real-time. You can see them adding ideas, connecting concepts, and voting on priorities. This shared visual space makes collaboration feel tangible and dynamic, rather than a static, turn-based process.
- Pro Tip: Use Miro's built-in timer for rapid-fire brainstorming sessions (e.g., "5 minutes to add as many ideas as possible!"). Use the "voting" feature to democratically decide on the best ideas without a lengthy debate.
6. FigJam by Figma: The Fun Brainstormer
While Miro is a powerhouse, FigJam is its fun, slightly chaotic cousin. Built by the team behind the design tool Figma, FigJam is laser-focused on ideation, workshops, and team rituals. It’s packed with playful features like stamps, stickers, and emotes that encourage participation.
FigJam lowers the barrier to collaboration. It feels less formal than Miro, which can help quieter team members feel more comfortable sharing nascent ideas. It's perfect for team retrospectives, icebreakers, or any session where creativity and psychological safety are paramount.
- Pro Tip: Start meetings with a FigJam icebreaker. Ask everyone to drop a pin on a world map showing where they are or to add a GIF that represents their current mood.
7. Loom: The Asynchronous Face-to-Face
Endless meetings are a major source of remote work fatigue. Loom offers a powerful alternative: asynchronous video messaging. You can record your screen, your camera, or both, allowing you to walk a colleague through a design, explain a complex spreadsheet, or give feedback on a document.
Receiving a Loom video adds a crucial human element that's missing from text. You can hear your colleague's tone of voice and see their facial expressions, which reduces miscommunication and builds a stronger connection. It says, "I value your time too much to schedule a meeting for this, but I still want to connect with you personally."
- Pro Tip: Use Loom for your weekly team updates instead of a status meeting. Each team member can record a 2-3 minute video sharing their progress and challenges. It’s more personal and efficient.
Project Management: With a Human Touch
These platforms are about more than just tasks; they're about celebrating progress together.
8. Notion: The All-in-One Team Wiki
Notion is a uniquely flexible workspace that can be a project manager, a knowledge base, a CRM, and more. For remote teams, its power lies in creating a "single source of truth" that everyone can access, which reduces the need for constant "where can I find..." messages.
But it's also a place for connection. Use it to create a team directory with fun facts about each person. Build a shared "Kudos" database where anyone can tag a colleague and celebrate a win. The comment and discussion features within pages can turn a project brief into a lively conversation.
- Pro Tip: Create a "Company Hub" page in Notion that includes the company mission, team directory, and a "wins of the month" gallery. This is a tool Goh Ling Yong often recommends for creating transparency and a shared sense of purpose.
9. Asana: Celebrating the Journey
Asana is a top-tier project management tool, but its features for celebrating progress are what make it watercooler-worthy. When you complete a major task, Asana often rewards you with a "celebration creature" flying across your screen—a small but delightful piece of positive reinforcement.
More importantly, it encourages a culture of appreciation. You can easily comment on tasks to say "great job," use the "Appreciation" feature to give kudos, and create project status updates that are more like a story of your team's progress, complete with highlights and shout-outs.
- Pro Tip: At the end of a project, use Asana's timeline view to create a visual "look back" at all the milestones you hit. Share it in a team meeting to celebrate the collective effort.
10. ClickUp: The Collaborative Powerhouse
ClickUp aims to be the "one app to replace them all," and it packs in a staggering number of features. For remote connection, its integrated Chat views, collaborative Whiteboards, and in-task comments are key.
You can have conversations directly within the context of a task, which keeps communication focused but still allows for personality to shine through with emojis and GIFs. The ability to assign comments to people turns a simple question into an actionable item, reducing friction and follow-up.
- Pro Tip: Use ClickUp's Docs feature to collaboratively draft documents. The real-time editing and commenting feel like you're working side-by-side on a shared document.
Social & Team Building: The Virtual Happy Hour
Sometimes you just need to have fun. These tools make it easy and genuinely enjoyable.
11. Kahoot!: The Quiz Master
Who doesn't love a good trivia game? Kahoot! lets you easily create and host live, multiple-choice quizzes that everyone can join from their phone or browser. It’s a fantastic way to run a fun, competitive, and engaging team event.
The games are fast-paced, the music is catchy, and the leaderboard adds a fun layer of competition. You can create quizzes about company trivia, inside jokes, or general knowledge. It’s a 30-minute dose of pure fun that gets everyone laughing.
- Pro Tip: Have different departments take turns creating and hosting a monthly Kahoot! It’s a great way to share a bit of their team's personality with the rest of the company.
12. Jackbox Games: The Laughter Factory
If you want guaranteed laughter, look no further than Jackbox Games. It's a collection of hilarious and easy-to-learn party games. One person hosts the game and shares their screen on a video call, and everyone else plays along using their phone as a controller.
Games like Quiplash (writing funny answers to prompts) and Drawful (terrible drawings, hilarious guesses) are perfect for breaking the ice and seeing your colleagues' creative and funny sides. It’s impossible to play a round of Jackbox without feeling more connected to your team.
- Pro Tip: Purchase a Jackbox Party Pack during a sale. It’s a one-time cost that provides hours of team-building entertainment for years to come.
13. Bonusly: The Recognition Platform
Feeling seen and appreciated is a fundamental human need, and it’s easy to feel invisible in a remote setting. Bonusly tackles this head-on. It's a peer-to-peer recognition platform where everyone gets a small monthly allowance of points to give to their colleagues.
When you see someone go above and beyond, you can give them points with a public message explaining why. This creates a real-time feed of all the great things happening in the company. The points can then be redeemed for real rewards. It fosters a culture of gratitude from the ground up.
- Pro Tip: Integrate Bonusly with Slack so that all the public recognition posts automatically appear in a dedicated
#kudoschannel for everyone to see and celebrate.
14. Glimpse: The Spontaneous Connector
Stuck in a long, boring Zoom meeting? Glimpse is here to help. It's an app that you can add to your video calls to initiate short, one-on-one, timed video chats between participants.
For a few minutes, the main meeting is paused, and everyone is whisked into a private conversation with a randomly assigned colleague. It’s a fantastic way to break up a long all-hands meeting or a training session, allowing people to have a quick, personal chat and return to the main group feeling more energized and connected.
- Pro Tip: Use Glimpse at the beginning of a large meeting as an icebreaker to get everyone warmed up and talking.
Focus & Wellness: Staying Sane Together
Fighting isolation also means taking care of your own (and your team's) mental well-being.
15. Focusmate: The Accountability Partner
Procrastination and a lack of structure can be a huge problem when working from home. Focusmate provides a unique solution: it pairs you with a stranger for a 50-minute, live, virtual co-working session.
You start the session by briefly stating your goal, and then you both work in silence with your cameras on. Just the simple act of having another person present provides a powerful sense of accountability. It’s a strangely intimate and effective way to beat procrastination and feel a sense of shared purpose.
- Pro Tip: Encourage your team to use Focusmate and share their experiences. It's an external tool, but promoting it shows you care about their productivity and well-being.
16. Headspace for Work: The Mindfulness Break
Burnout is a major risk for remote workers. Offering a tool like Headspace shows that your company prioritizes mental health. The platform provides guided meditations, focus music, and exercises for stress and anxiety.
You can take this a step further by incorporating it into your team rituals. Start a weekly meeting with a 5-minute group meditation session led by the app. It’s a simple way to create a moment of calm, collective presence before diving into work.
- Pro Tip: Create a Slack channel dedicated to mindfulness where people can share their favorite meditations or articles on mental wellness.
17. Clockwise: The Schedule Guardian
Clockwise is a smart calendar assistant that optimizes your team's schedule to create more blocks of uninterrupted "Focus Time." It automatically resolves meeting conflicts and moves meetings to the least disruptive times.
How does this fight isolation? By protecting your time, it reduces the frantic, back-to-back meeting culture that leaves no room for casual interaction or deep thinking. When your schedule has breathing room, you have the mental and temporal space to reach out to a colleague for a non-urgent chat, which is exactly what we're missing.
- Pro Tip: Use Clockwise's team analytics to see if your team is getting enough focus time. Use this data to start a conversation about creating healthier, more connected work habits.
18. Tandem: The Virtual Office Vibe
Tandem strikes a balance between the gamified world of Gather and the pure utility of Slack. It's a desktop app that creates a virtual office, showing you who is in what app (e.g., Figma, Google Docs) and who is available to talk.
With one click, you can start a conversation with a colleague or a group. It’s designed to make spontaneous conversation as easy as leaning over a desk. It reduces the "friction" of having to schedule a call, making quick collaboration feel natural again.
- Pro Tip: Set your status in Tandem to signal what you're open to. A "headphones" icon can mean you're in deep focus, while a "waving hand" can signal you're free for a chat.
19. Around: The Un-Meeting Tool
Around rethinks the video call interface. Instead of giant talking heads in a grid, it places participants in small, floating circles on your screen. This frees up your desktop so you can focus on your work while still feeling connected to your team.
It's designed for collaboration, not just presentation. It has features like AI-powered noise cancellation that filters out background noise (like a vacuum or a barking dog), making the experience smoother and less stressful. It feels less like a formal meeting and more like a casual co-working session.
- Pro Tip: Use Around for pair programming or collaborative writing sessions. The minimalist interface allows you to focus on the shared document while still seeing your collaborator's reactions.
20. tldv: The Meeting Recorder and Summarizer
Let’s be honest: not everyone needs to be in every meeting. Being invited to irrelevant meetings is isolating in its own way—it makes you feel like your time isn't valued. tldv is an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes your calls.
By recording meetings, you empower your team to catch up on their own time. Colleagues can skip meetings that are only partially relevant to them and review the transcript or AI-generated summary later. This frees up everyone's calendar, respects their time, and fosters a culture of trust and autonomy.
- Pro Tip: In the tldv recording, you can tag colleagues in the transcript at specific moments. They'll get a notification and can jump directly to the 2-minute snippet that's relevant to them, saving them from watching the entire hour.
Tools Are Only Half the Battle
Mastering these tools will undoubtedly help you and your team feel more connected. But remember, a tool is only as effective as the culture you build around it. You can have the fanciest virtual office, but if no one "walks the halls," it’s just an empty digital space.
The real key is to be intentional. Schedule the fun. Encourage the non-work chatter. Lead by example by being vulnerable and sharing a bit of your own life. Make connection a priority, not an afterthought. The goal isn't to replicate the physical office perfectly, but to build something new—a remote culture that is deliberate, inclusive, and deeply human.
Now, I want to hear from you. What are your go-to 'watercooler-worthy' tools for fighting remote work isolation? Share your favorites and best practices in the comments below
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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