Collaborative Working Tools

7 Best Collaborative Working Tools For Remote Workers

By Jessica Robinson 4 years ago
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The outbreak of the pandemic has made remote working the new normal for organizations across the globe. When talking about the challenges faced by remote workers, collaborative working often tops the list. It is in lack of proper teamwork that the performance of your remote working team gets negatively impacted. This makes it important for you to introduce your remote working employees with some effective collaborative working tools. It is by using these tools that your remote working team can overcome the collaborative working challenge and work productively. 

Given below is a list of 7 best collaborative working tools to help your remote working team work together in an efficient manner. 

 1. Trello: 

Trello is simple and easy to use the tool by using which you and your remote workers can work together in a virtual environment. It is owned by Atlassian, which offers software development and collaboration tools.

Important Features of Trello:

Trello basically offers the three components mentioned below:

  • Boards: The Trello board works just like a notice board. It enables your remote working teams to organize the list of tasks and distribute them among themselves. It is through these boards that different team members can also share among themselves information about the tasks to be performed. Further, the Trello boards consist of lists and cards.
  • Lists: This is a very attractive feature of Trello. It enables you to create different lists and share them with your remote working team. These lists are contained within the boards. For example, you can create to-do, doing, and done lists.  The to-do list can contain all the tasks which have to be done, the doing list can be used for indicating the task you are working on and the done list can indicate the tasks completed.

 It is with the help of different lists that you can keep a track of the work progress, share the work targets for the day, and have a happy working together.

  • Cards: The cards feature of the Trello app, offers you the facility to add on information about specific tasks mentioned in the lists. It is with the help of the information mentioned in the cards that you can make your remote working team understand the different tasks to be done in a better manner. Along with this, you can also use card labels to categorize and prioritize the tasks. For example, by labeling a card red, you can indicate that the task is of high priority.

2. Google Meet: 

Google Meet is an app by using which you and your remote working teams can conduct virtual meetings. It is completely secure and offers encryption for video conferences in transit. There are different plans from which you can choose depending upon the number of participants and meeting length. You can organize meetings of length up to 60 minutes and involve up to 100 participants, for free. For further increments in the duration of the meeting and the number of participants paid plans are available. Furthermore, the number of meetings which can be conducted in a day are unlimited for each plan.

Important Features of Google Meet:

  • Enables screen sharing with participants
  • Works well on all devices such as laptop, smartphone, and iPhone
  • Provides live messaging facility to the participants during meetings
  • Participants can join meetings directly from their Gmail accounts

3. Slack: 

Slack is an effective business communication platform that enables your remote working teams to communicate properly, share files among themselves, and work collaboratively from anywhere.

Important Features of Slack:

  • Organized communication channels: At Slack, communications appear in the form of organized channels. These channels integrate messages from different work teams, people, and departments, separately. For example, all the messages from the marketing team are stacked in the marketing channel.
  • Provision of searchable history: This feature enables you to find important files, messages, and other information by searching your team’s conversation history.
  • Voice and Video Calls: Slack also offers you the opportunity to have both voice and video calls with your teammates. You can also share your screen with your teammates when having a video call.

4. Asana:

Asana is an app that enables your work teams to organize tasks, track the work progress, and work together in a coordinated manner.

Important features of Asana:

  • List: This feature of the asana app allows you to create customized to-do lists. You can assign these tasks to your telecommuting workers and the photographs of the assignees get displayed in front of the task. Along with this, you can also mention the due date of every task along with the indication of the priority level by using different colors
  • Board: With the help of this feature you can organize your team projects in a very effective manner. For example, you can highlight the backlogs of your ongoing projects, give suggestions to your team about them, list down the things done, and also the tasks in progress. As this board is visible to all your team members they can easily receive all the information through them.
  • Timeline: The timeline feature of the asana app gives you a way to map different tasks that your team needs to perform to accomplish the desired goal. You can represent all these tasks in a branched format and represent the path to accomplishment of the goal.  This branched format is a great way to track your work progress as you can mark the completed tasks as done. Further, the different tasks which you represent on the branches, also carry along with the images of the assignees.

5. Github: 

Github is a very useful collaborative tool for your software development team. It allows you to share codes with each other. You can also download the code created by any of your team members from Github and make the required additions.

Important features of Github:

  • Branching: It is with the branching feature of the Github app that you can copy the source code and work on it independently.
  • Merging: This feature of Github, allows you to merge your changes back to the main branch, after testing its proper working.
  • Tracking of changes: Github keeps a track of all the changes which are made to code. You can view all these changes line by line with the help of the blame view. As you click on a code line, the changes made along with the name of your teammate, who made the changes is displayed on the screen.
  • Code reviews: Github enables you to derive code reviews for your code from your team members. For this, you just have to start with a pull request. A pull request tells your teammates about the changes you have embedded in the code. Further, as your teammates open your pull request, you can discuss the possible amendments which can make your code even better.
  • Project Management: Github enables you to assign different tasks to your remote working team members by mentioning their names in the pull request. As you do so, they’ll receive a notification about the task assigned to them.

6. Figma: 

Figma is a design collaborative interface tool that enables your remote working team to create prototypes and test the designs together in an online space.

Important features of Figma:

  • Enables Commenting on the design: All your teammates having access links to the design can comment on it anywhere. These comments can be best used to suggest changes. You can also tag people in your comments to draw their attention.
  • Displays latest updates: Figma offers project pages wherein you can pin files for your teammates to access. Along with this you can also write notes on project pages and share them with your teammates.
  •  Tracks history of the changes: Figma enables you to track the history of different changes made in the design. You can go back to a previous state if required.

7. ProofHub:

ProofHub is a project planning software by using which your remote team can work together in an effortless manner. It enables you to share different files, notes, and other important stuff with each other. Furthermore, you can also use ProofHub to engage in discussions with your team members, assign them with different tasks, and manage your projects properly.

Important features of ProofHub:

  • Planning: ProofHub offers different planning features by using which you can plan projects with your remote team. Kanban boards, task assigner, Gantt Chart are some examples of the planning features offered by ProofHub.
  • Collaboration: ProofHub offers different collaborating features that allow you to organize discussions, have chats, make mentions, and announcements for your remote working team. You can use all these collaborating features to work together in an easy and productive manner.
  • Organizing stuff: Your team can organize stuff such as files, documents, and notes easily on proofHub. It is with this feature that your teammates won’t have to worry about losing important stuff because of mismanagement.

To conclude, working together as a team is one of the biggest challenges faced by your remote working employees. You can help them overcome this challenge by introducing them with the effective collaborative working tools mentioned above.

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