What is remote collaboration?

remote team collaboration

The fact that Todoist is never more than a couple of clicks or taps away makes it very convenient to use. The business plan only costs $5/month for each user and lets you add up to 50 people to a single project. It can be difficult to coordinate meetings across different time zones, and the distance between teams can make it hard to work effectively.

Centralized information improves efficiency because the information your team accesses on a day-to-day basis becomes self-serve. The more your team knows where to quickly find the information they need, the better. When you think of remote work, you often imagine a more peaceful environment, remote team collaboration freed from the distractions of the workplace.

  1. Leading remote teams require clear goals and objectives for projects as well as team communication.
  2. These seven tips for improving collaboration with remote teams will get you well on your way to standardizing project management and communication across your organization.
  3. But following these best practices and ideas for collaboration in the workplace might make it a lot less painful.
  4. Project management tools like Asana or Trello provide deadline tracking and updating capabilities to keep everyone aware of project statuses without intruding on peoples’ work.
  5. The focus is on borderless communication between team members and business partners worldwide.
  6. Remote collaboration is necessary in today’s workplaces, but it doesn’t always come naturally.

Let’s say the team has decided to prioritize one project, but someone on the team believes it should be focusing on something else. And without the ease of stopping by to clarify with your colleagues, it’s easy for bad habits and sloppy workarounds to become ingrained. “When people are able to reference a document that shows the workflow channels, to have the work-back schedule, it gives them a very clear directive,” said Brochhausen.

The biggest difference between remote and real-world collaboration is, of course, in the way your team communicates. This doesn’t just mean moving from face-to-face conversations to chat rooms and video meetings, it also means changing up the way you structure instructions and communicate ideas. Below, we’ve compiled a list of 6 key strategies that will help you get the most out of your remote collaboration, including the effective use of remote tracking tools like Basecamp time tracking. If we’re talking about raw functionality in the context of remote collaboration then nothing beats G Suite. Speaking of online communication, let’s take a detour over to the VoIP space.

  1. By prioritizing these elements, remote teams can work together more efficiently and achieve their goals.
  2. They boost productivity, improve employee morale, and open doors to a broader talent pool.
  3. Collaboration software has made it possible to work effectively from anywhere.
  4. Remote work collaboration allows them to find employees without being concerned about geographical limits.

How to Manage Remote Agile Teams Effectively

Feeling appreciated at work has been linked to better physical health, higher levels of engagement, and greater workplace satisfaction. Despite these obvious benefits, many companies fail to establish recognition as a core element of their culture. This is a problem—especially for remote companies and teams, who have less opportunity to show appreciation in the first place. So, let’s take a look at the different tools and methods for remote collaboration, as well as some tips on how to get the most out of them.

Organize Tasks Expertly

While doing all this when you’re working together in real time is practical and fun, Slack excels asynchronously too. Notion is your digital company bible that operates as a secure online wiki. For remote teams, it replaces the collective understanding that comes from sharing a physical space. It’s a place to record and refer to protocol, workflow, standards and branding, literally keeping everyone on the same page. You can fill it with related sub-projects or deliverables, checklists and ongoing dialogue. Trello integrates with other collaborative tools like Slack and Google Drive, so you always know what you should tackle next and where your colleagues are in each project.

With CoffeePals, employees are randomly matched with coworkers for informal video chats—kind of like the chats you’d have around the office coffee maker! These spontaneous connections help your team build meaningful relationships that keep them engaged, accountable, and happy. When working remotely, it’s sometimes hard to build relationships with teammates and management. That means it’s all the more important to find creative ways to facilitate socializing.

Tool 1: Happeo

Office 365 Microsoft’s remote collaboration suite that makes their well-known Word, Excel, and Powerpoint available online. If you’re looking for a collaboration tool for remote teams that work with spreadsheets and need a wide range of functionalities, then Office 365 is the place. Full-time or part-time remote employees can create, share, and edit documents together at the same time, all from one location online. File sharing tools like Google Drive are easy to use and inexpensive to implement. Teams with more security needs or robust requirements can consider Microsoft Sharepoint.

Expert Insights and Real-World Examples

Figma is an online design tool that promotes collaborative interface design and prototyping. Its cloud-based nature lets multiple team members work on the same design simultaneously. Figma’s powerful features and real-time collaboration capabilities streamline the design process from ideation to execution.

remote team collaboration

It provides a visual and intuitive interface that makes it easy for teams to collaborate, stay organized, and keep track of their progress. Monday.com offers advanced automation systems that let you put most of your to-do list on autopilot, improving collaboration while reducing tedious administrative workloads. If projects are longer than general, then breaking the project into smaller parts and assigning goals to each part can help your teams stay on track.

remote team collaboration

In the past, support usually was provided in the form of a video call looking for a solution to the problem. To effectively collaborate as a team a company has to be excellent at communicating the big picture. From the top of the organization down to the entry-level employees, everyone needs to share a mission, language and set of values to operate as a team.

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About the author

A Student of Class 11, New Delhi, Prisha Jain is a 16-year-old dreamer who aspires to give the world an insight into her mind.