In a world where remote teams, flexi working hours and international resourcing have become the norm, being able to collaborate effectively has become slightly more challenging. There’s a lot to be said about face-to-face interaction, but with so many great online collaboration tools entering the market, you can create that same synergy without the need to be in the same room.
But when trying to select the right tool, you may find yourself overwhelmed by choice with so many options flooding the internet month-by-month. At Analyze, we’ve had a good look around and have settled on the following as our top 5:
- Yammer:
Yammer acts as a private social network for your business. It’s great for sharing updates across various teams, departments and locations, and your employees can organise and filter information by creating different groups. Employees will sign up using their company email address after which they can access Yammer via the web, their desktop or laptop or even their phone. You also have the option to chat openly or privately, share docs and like each other’s statuses and updates. Think of it as Facebook, but way more productive of course. - Slack:
Slack has quickly become the hip new kid on the block as far as online communication tools go. Slack uses the concept of “channels” to help organise business conversations. Employees can subscribe to one or multiple channels where they can have real-time conversations that never gets lost. It reduces the need for lengthy meetings & endless emails and ensures that all communications are stored in one central place and that nobody gets left out of the loop. They also have fun add-ons, like “HeyTaco!” where employees can reward tacos to other team members for a job well done. It helps to build relationships while also supporting informal employee recognition. - Skype:
Not exactly an exciting newcomer to the scene, Skype of course has been around for quite some time, but over the years it certainly has become a powerful business tool. It remains to be the biggest VOIP platform on the market and the best part is that it’s free. It’s group call feature is great for getting a group of up to 25 people from different locations (and even different time zones) together into one virtual boardroom. - Basecamp:
Basecamp is a project management tool aimed at small to medium business who are looking for a better way to organise their project work. It brings everything your company’s working on into one central space, giving you a clear view of what everyone’s working on at any given time. It also has a to-dos areas for tracking work, a message board for posting updates, a “campfire” chat room, a schedule area for tracking project timelines, a documents & files space and an automatic check-in option to get feedback from your team. - Google Docs:
Google Docs is one of the easiest ways to share, edit & collaborate on all kinds of documents online. Multiple people can work on the same document at the same time from multiple locations, editing in real-time while chatting and commenting along the way. Changes are saved automatically and a revision history is kept of all changes, sortable by date & person. What could be easier than that?
Want to pick our brains about improving your team’s online collaboration abilities? Get in touch.
