You’ve got an important project your team needs to focus on now. You can either kick off the project or let it go. Either way, you have the meeting scheduled and everyone has a set time slot to present their ideas. You probably have a few brainstorming tools for remote teams in mind, but how do you decide which one is going to work best? Are there even ways to use any of these tools at all?
The year 2020, also known as, the year of the pandemic, brought many changes with it. The most impactful change was on the way humans work, and as a result, a large number of businesses went remote and on the mercy of effective collaboration tools for remote teams.
These collaboration tools are quite the saviors when it comes to businesses retaining their profits and getting proper value out of their employees. It would benefit you more if you are using one of the suggested tools on this list because they have been known to garner productivity to great lengths.
There is no straight answer when it comes to purchasing any tool for any work related to the organizational paradigm because there are dozens and dozens of applications and their alternatives available. But we can try to find the perfect match for us.
In this article, we will tell you about the best collaboration tools for remote teams available in the market right now. You could use these tools to streamline your workflow if your company recently transitioned to work from home mode due to COVID-19 issues.
1. ProofHub
ProofHub is an online project management software that is trusted by hundreds of remote teams to bring everything at one place. Team members can have seamless interactions with fellow teammates and clients. ProofHub comes with a plenty of features such as online proofing, discussions, chat to share feedback and remote project management only at a central place. ProofHub being an all-in-one remote project management software is a must-have for teams that demand a greater level of management proficiency.
Organize your remote team to get more work done. Use ProofHub.
Read On: Benefits of Project Management Software
2. Basecamp
Basecamp is a popular choice among managers, teams, freelancers, and agencies for its simple functionality, clean design, and elegant usability. It’s a project management and team collaboration software solution that helps you manage projects and communicate with clients in a meaningful way.
It offers a range of features and tools for sharing ideas, organizing conversations, and keeping everyone on the same page throughout the project.
At the same time, you get to experience limitations like no time tracking, no ability to archive topics, no subtasks, no professional team hierarchy, only outside integrations, etc. These limitations are the very reason why organizations and teams (especially growing teams) are looking for the best alternatives to Basecamp.
Well, no tool is perfect. At the end of the day, it is your specific needs that will decide whether or not a tool is ideal for your business. So, if Basecamp seems like a fair choice to you, give it a try.
3. Instagantt
Instagantt is a powerful project management software that helps you visually plan, control, and schedule your projects. It’s a lot more than just a Gantt chart creator. When giving it a try, you’ll quickly notice you’re working with a super intuitive and beautifully built software that allows you to develop an accurate illustration of your projects.
Communication is also a huge part of Instagantt. This software allows you to streamline your entire workflow and collaborate with your team members, making it a perfect fit for remote working, too. Instagantt also comes with plenty of useful features such as the ability to create tasks and subtasks, templates for different types of projects, guidelines, milestones, notifications, baselines, critical path, and automatic project scheduling, all of which promote the feeling of being 100% sure of what’s going on with your projects at all times.
There are many advantages to using Instagantt, but definitely one of the most important ones is being able to track meaningful details such as information related to deadlines, risks, priorities, and estimated hours and costs. It’s also perfect for managing different types of projects, clients, and teams, or even for being able to keep track of how each individual person is managing their workload. It’s definitely a good idea to give Instagantt a try.
Best Team Collaboration Tool
With the rise in distributed companies, working with teams across borders is becoming a norm. Communication issues are bound to occur when the teams are not together in a room.
4. Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger is a compact remote work tool for small, medium, and large enterprises. This high functionality, low-complexity tool addresses various domain specificities. Team members can interact via instant messaging, audio and video calling, location and file sharing, and by creating unlimited groups on the go.
This Slack alternative allows admins to add vendors, suppliers, and freelancers as orange members who get restricted access to the workspace. Troop Messenger can be integrated with essential apps like Dropbox and Google Drive. With Troop Messenger, your team can migrate their files, documents, and do a lot more than texting. It is the best work from home communication tools your team needs to ensure business continuity during COVID-19.
5. Bit.ai
Bit.ai, the next-gen document management and collaboration platform is one of the most effective ways to collaborate across teams. Bit’s smart documents help you weave together digital rich content into collaborative documents. Enhance your communication and knowledge sharing across your team by attaching files, adding code blocks, and displaying rich media like Google Sheets, Typeform surveys, Airtable databases, Figma designs, and much more across 100+ applications into your documents.
The best part is that you can do all of this and more while collaborating in real-time. Bit is one of the smartest ways for your team to collaborate on internal communication, project documentation, technical docs, processes, training manuals, internal knowledge bases, client-facing content, and much more.
A bonus feature is that your team can even collaborate with guests on documents and create workspace data rooms. This is really useful functionality if your workflows require you to collaborate with those outside of your organization like clients, consultants, vendors, etc.
Don’t waste a minute and start creating, sharing, organizing, managing, and tracking all of your team’s knowledge in one place with Bit.ai.
6. Slack
Slack is a messaging remote work tool that everybody loves. A digital space that helps in communication among teammates, allow them to share ideas, share comment in real time so everything moves swiftly. You can have all your team communication in one place wherever you go with a remote collaboration tool. When the teams are remote, they can use Slack channels for instant messaging and collaboration. It will bring all your team communication in one place making managing remote employees a lot easy. Slack offers fully native apps for iOS and Android to give you complete functionality.
Also Read: 26 Best Slack Alternatives for Team Communication (You Cannot Live Without)
7. Hypercontext
Hypercontext is a shared agenda app that empowers managers and their teams to be high-performing by combining quarterly priorities, weekly meetings, and engagement measures, all in one place.With Hypercontext, teams can collaborate on meeting agendas for 1:1s, team meetings, and cross-functional meetings. With access to 500 conversation starters and over 180 goal examples, the platform helps you run meetings that are productive and meaningful. After each meeting, you’re kept accountable with clear next steps. Plus, managers get conversation analytics to better understand communication blindspots, and real-time employee feedback to track meeting effectiveness over time. Hypercontext provides integrations with Google Suite, Chrome, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook and more! So you can easily streamline objectives, meetings and morale, all in one workflow.
Best Cloud Storage Service
Cloud storage is a perfect-sharing tool especially for remote Cloud Storage & Collaboration, documents and multimedia files are too large to send by email.
8. Google Drive
Google Drive is a cloud storage platform to keep all your files in one secure and centralized location. The remote workers can store and share documents, spreadsheets, and slide presentations. It can be used for reporting on weekly metrics. Additionally, Google Drive files can be synced across devices, so the individuals can view and update them from anywhere.
9. Dropbox
It doesn’t work so well to share large files over email, therefore, Dropbox is a modern workspace that offers various features for managing remote employees. Remote workers can easily sync, share and collaborate on documents. This cloud storage system has API that makes is useful for remote collaborators. It allows for sharing big files – powerpoint, photoshop, sketch with anyone.
Read On: Importance Of Collaboration In The Workplace
Best Productivity Tool
Remote productivity is a crucial part of remote workers. Managing remote team workers greatly means to make sure everyone is as productive as they can be.
10. Krisp
Krisp is a noise cancelling app that helps remote professionals and teams be more productive. It removes background noise on both sides of the call, so you and your call participants can take important calls from anywhere. You can use it with any communication app (Zoom, Skype, Slack, and many others) and enjoy more productive remote meetings.
Conclusions
As a remote team manager, it’s my job to communicate ideas, facilitate discussions, and lead the brainstorming process. Here are two of the most critical questions I ask people in every meeting.