Featured article by Caitlyn Bell, Independent Technology Author
Remote working is the new trend in the corporate landscape. More individuals want the freedom to work on their own terms, from a location of their choice.
The best part is, remote working seems to be boosting productivity levels. Surveys show over two-thirds of employees believe they are more productive when they are working from home.
With that said, there are several challenges associated with a remote working team.
Facilitating stellar communication, enabling seamless collaboration, making sure remote employees don’t feel disconnected, are all challenges that you, as a manager, will have to overcome.
The good news is, there are several cost-effective tools in the market that you can employ to help you overcome these remote working obstacles.
Let’s look at some of them in a bit more detail:
Project Management
Tracking tasks and quality of work is perhaps the most common challenge managers and employers face when it comes to remote working employees.
A strong project management platform will help your teams determine exactly what they need to be doing with their time. With the tool, managers can not only assign tasks, but also highlight their priority and urgency levels to make sure the overall productivity of their team remains constant.
At the same time, it will also enable the management (or you) to track their progress efficiently, in one place.
Top Project Management Tools: You can choose from specialised tools such as CollabX (best for digital marketing agencies) and general collaboration tools such as Quire. These are easy to use, and at the same time, offer powerful project management features.
Collaborative Online Whiteboards
Efficient collaboration capabilities are the backbone of a remote working team. The ability to seamlessly collaborate from different locations help teams overcome the barrier of distance, while letting operational innovation thrive.
The benefits of collaboration are not limited just to ideation and project completion. If your business is offering learning and development opportunities to your employees, the right collaboration tool can help you boost efficiency of your efforts.
While at one time, video conferencing on Skype was as far as virtual collaboration could get you, the rise of virtual whiteboards has absolutely revolutionised the way teams collaborate and learn. These tools bring all the functionality of a whiteboard to your devices along with some extremely useful features such as graph plotting abilities, interpreting mathematical and chemical equations.
The best virtual whiteboard softwares even have conferencing and chatting capabilities integrated within them.
Top Collaboration Tools: When it comes to online whiteboards, HuddleIQ is hands down the most feature loaded option in the market right now.
Content Creation
In the age of branding and branded storytelling, if a business needs to stand out from the noise, creating unique content seems to be the only way out.
However, creating high-quality, unique content isn’t the challenge. Producing such content consistently is the real challenge. The best way to do so is to cultivate team-generated ideas.
With a collaborative content creation tool, doing so becomes easy. Most content collaboration platforms support multiple devices and enable effective tracking of contribution and progress for the management.
Top Content Creation Tools: Creative365 is a great collaboration tool that offers a host of quirky features. The platform is great when you are creating powerful visual content such as presentations and videos. If you wish to collaborate over written content, nothing tops the functionality and user friendliness of Google Docs.
Conclusion
Remote team or not, effective collaboration capabilities that transcend the boundaries of physical distance, are the key to success in a digitally connected world. Having the right collaboration tools will enable your business to work with the top talent in any industry, regardless of where they are located.
Did we miss out on your favorite collaboration tools? Share them with us (and everyone else) in the comment section below.
