Team Collaboration Tools for Remote Employees

By: Surya Patra (LinkedIn)

We often say good collaboration within the team is vital for organisation’s productivity, efficacy and efficiency. This doesn’t need emphasising enough when it comes to working with remote teams. The one thing that needs to be done well is to let the remote team members talk to each other and collaborate as often as needed. Sharing with one another what team members are doing, understanding the interdependencies of their individual pieces of work, and being able to ask what they need to know real time when they need to know are critical aspects of team working and are paramount to success of any organisation.

As working remotely is getting more prevalent across the globe, the employers are challenged to find ways and means to keep the remote employees well connected so as to build collaborative teams. There is a wide array of collaboration tools available in the market, however in this blog I am discussing some cost-effective ones that prove to be handy and useful. A thoughtful selection and deployment of tools appropriate to the culture and size of the organisation will help cement the trust between the employer and employees, much needed in a remote working set up.

 

 

Brief

Brief is a cloud-based team collaboration tool. It comes as an easy to use app that allows the employees to share messages, files and images within their teams. The app can be easily installed on a wide variety of devices and can prove to be a very handy ‘go to’ tool that can be used on a day to day basis for sharing documents and files within the remote teams. It’s feature-rich offering an elegant dashboard. In addition to the features, such as, message chat, video chat and team hubs, it also provides means to self-organise by allowing to maintain to-do lists, prioritizing tasks, etc. With Brief one can easily transfer large files and images, regardless of their size.

Asana

Asana as a project management and collaboration tool is rich with features, usability and user-friendliness. For what it offers, it’s popular with many enterprises these days. It allows to track tasks in visual lists, boards, timelines or calendar formats to suit to the individual project needs and convenience. Asana provides easy-to-use dashboards to track and plan multiple projects of varied types aiming to offer complete team solutions. It interfaces well with a host of other tools such as Google sheets, Dropbox, Hourstack, Slack, etc., providing one single integrated platform for multiple purposes. With features like Task Management, Communication Dashboards and cutting-edge Integrations, undoubtedly it is one of the most widely used project management and team collaboration tools these days.

Basecamp

Basecamp as a collaboration tool ensures that none of the employees loses track and is left behind. Keeping everyone on the same page in a team can be difficult sometimes, and more so in an organisation with employees working from diverse locations. Some of the features that set Basecamp apart are Message Boards that enable to make quick announcements relating to the project or quick status updates.

Basecamp is somewhat similar to more popular Trello, which is a card-based task and project management tool (similar to using Post-it notes) making team collaboration easier. Trello mimics real-life boards to manage the projects. Asana on the other hand takes a task-oriented approach and offers better workflow functionality. Trello is easy to work with, but Asana has a broader set of features.

 

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Podio

Podio as an online collaboration tool, aiming to help the employers improve the structure of the workflows by offering a way to organise unwieldy stacks of work and makes it easy to assign the specific tasks to different employees. The tool enables sharing of files within the team, get feedback real time, and track status of the projects.

Conceptboard

Conceptboard is an instant whiteboard for teams and projects, and to that extent serves as a collaboration tool for the employees operating from dispersed locations.

 

Communication Tools:

Whereby

Whereby is a great communication tool for small teams of about a dozen or fewer employees, especially suitable where employees are spread out. In larger corporate setting this tool is not as useful, where the  applications such as, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Skype, Webex, GoToMeetings, GoogleMeet or Zoom have proven to be indispensable. However, even within the large enterprises, Whereby can be quite useful for small teams having dispersed employees or where teams need to deal with external contractors or freelancers.

 

Employees Wellness Tool:

Besides the collaborative and project management aspects, another very important area that needs to be carefully looked at and managed among the remote employees is maintaining the social connectivity, belongingness, and well-being, so as to keep them motivated and engaged with the organisational affairs. Remote working comes with the obvious benefits of convenience and cost-saving, but as potential downsides, it throws the challenges of keeping the staff in good mental health and spirit.

CircleCare

CircleCare is one of the tools that makes it fun and engaging for the remote employees to keep them motivated in a holistic manner, to achieve their health goals, while maintaining their social, physical and occupational wellness, eventually leading to higher morale and productivity.

Read about – Recruiting a Remote Workforce for Business Success 

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