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The article was initially published on Troop Messenger
Switching to remote work is a trend that dominates. The latest reports indicate doubling the number of remote workers in the recent 10 years. And despite the famous Yahoo ban in 2015 that forced the employees to return to the offices, the trend for remote job opportunities keeps on expanding globally.
Among driving forces facilitating this growth, there are new managerial practices and innovative tech solutions that enable top companies to increase hiring remote teams.
Lack of effective tools, however, might hinder the productivity of your team so making the right choice in terms of software that would empower the team collaboration, will save you from facing numerous challenges.
Below there is a list of 10 ultimate tools you will find useful when working with a remote team.
Online Collaboration Tools
*Troop Messenger *
When searching for more interactive team collaboration, Troop Messenger comes as a leader. It will satisfy any team’s needs due to the simplicity of its implementation in an entrepreneurial environment.
Working as a fully-fledged business communication platform, Troop Messenger gives you instant access to unlocking a great number of functions:
Instant messaging
Making video calls
Conducting video conferences
Sharing files
Desktop sharing
Creating complex schedules.
Arranging the work schedule within Troop Messenger will let you keep project info fully organized and, thus, secure all the project performance data.
*GoToMeeting *
It is optimal in case you need a tool for arranging online meetings. It works both ways, with customers and team members. The tool provides a high-quality connection and ranges as the most reliable software. With support assisting you 24/7 and instant availability of joining or hosting the meeting options, you can start a meetup, webinar, or a regular call hassle-free.
GoToMeeting is an ultimate communication choice for remote teams. A click on the link across any device will be a signal for activating various options:
Sharing the screen
Making notes over the images
Recording the conversations
Settings for adjusting the visibility of participants’ faces
*ProProfs
*ProProfs Project is not an over the top project management software but has made its name in the market for it's easy to use UI and simple features.
From startups to enterprises, anyone can use this robust project management tool to streamline workflow, boost team communication, and improve team productivity.
ProProfs Project helps you to:
Create & track projects on one dashboard
Track time spent on tasks by each team member
Collaborate with your teams anytime, anywhere
Create insightful reports in seconds
Bill your clients automatically
*TMetric
*When you have to arrange the effective collaboration of your remote team, the first issue you need to address is means of providing accuracy of time calculations.
TMetric is an effective time tracking tool as it not only enables recording data on your work time in a single-click from any gadget but also has additional functions coming handy for remote work mode:
Creating an invoice
Generating various reports (including the ones that will summarize your team performance on the project)
Setting various pay rates for billable hours
Offline time tracking
Tagging projects for facilitating the workflow
Available on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android and iOS
Integrating with 100+ apps remote teams use in their work.
This Timesheet software help allocate tasks to employees, track time spent, keep track of billable time to charge customers, calculate payroll, create invoices and keep track of expenses. Here's a quick list of 10 different timesheet software solutions and how they can help you manage your team better.
BlogIn
BlogIn is a beautifully simple internal blog and knowledge-sharing platform for teams of all sizes. The internal blog acts as a central information hub or a ‘virtual bulletin board’ for the company, allowing all employees to stay in the loop with what’s going on in and around the office.
At the same time, the blog opens a new, transparent, two-way communication channel inside an organization, where everyone can ask a question and get the information they need to make faster and smarter decisions.
The internal blog is intuitive and easy to use, so everyone can quickly get on board, which is one of the reasons why it works so well as the internal communication tool.
Share internal news and knowledge
Improve internal communication
Share files
Boost company culture
Enables transparent, two-way communication
Usernap
"Show, don't tell" - use screenshots and illustrations to communicate issues accurately and quickly. Usersnap's widget can be easily installed on your staging website or use the browser extension to capture anything you see and want to share.
Microsoft, Facebook and many web companies employ Usersnap for issue reporting, QA, user acceptance testing and customer feedback. Visual bug reports and feedback saves you time and makes remote working so easy.
Browser screen capture and annotations
Tickets include metadata (screen size, browser version, URL and console logs)
Assign, label, track and close tickets easily
Integrates with 30+ tools such as Jira and Asana
Live commenting
Unlimited guest access
JotForm
JotForm is an extremely versatile online form builder which is suited for a team of any size. It doesn’t require any development skills as it’s essentially a drag-and-drop form builder. So, your entire team can benefit from it. It has a surprising amount of use cases which you can apply to your business or use it to manage your team.
You can use it to clock in the work hours of your employees, collect feedback, assign tasks, open bug reports and the list goes on, it’s all up to how creative you can get with it.
The best part is that you have a wide variety of customization options for the forms you create. You can prevent things from getting boring for your team and have a sustainable remote team. As there are way too many templates and customization options you can check a form design guide they have prepared.
Easy to use and implement
Makes collaboration seamless
Loads of customization options
Wide range of use cases
SmartTask
SmartTask is a simple yet powerful task and project management tool, which will help your team be more effective and efficient than ever before.
It brings the organization's tasks at one place thus everyone in a team has a clear overview of the team's progress, who's responsible and has clarity on the deadlines.
The tool enables you with the following features:
Tasks, Projects and CRM in one tool
Custom Fields to customize your tasks
Multiple Projects in one single view with Portfolio feature
Real-time communication and notifications
Available on Desktop, Android and IOS
Tameday
Tameday is the all-in-one workspace for teams and small businesses that are struggling to manage their projects and workloads with various separate tools and email- Bringing everything into one place
Tameday helps you to:
Get rid of using email for internal communication by using Tameday's built-in chat feature.
Keep your work and to-dos in one place within Projects,
Communicate and share files with your team who are working remotely.
Keep in contact with your clients by allowing them to see how projects are progressing,
Keep you on track with to-dos, discussions, project due dates and your own personal calendar.
*Wrike
*Wrike is a perfectly illustrative example of how to integrate a favorite task management tool with time tracking software so that it could enhance your remote team productivity.
Wrike helps prioritize projects easily due to its intuitive design. It keeps all the info on tasks you perform. Additionally, when applying integrations in Wrike, you can:
Estimate the project resources with precision,
Adjust timelines for specific tasks,
Reassign tasks to accommodate urgent requests
Tailor your tasks to projects goals.
ClickUp
It is a productivity platform that helps you create tasks and plan your projects. While implementing ClickUp, you have the unique opportunity to organize the scattered tasks into the unbroken workflow.
With ClickUp, you get the abundance of options pertaining to:
commenting on tasks,
advanced task storing,
agenda creating
keeping your data as secure as you choose by regulating privacy settings.
Parabol
Parabol is software not bloated with extra functions as its primary goal is to provide your team with ‘free online retrospectives’. This part of project management practice is crucial for further planning and better estimation of the coming projects. This tool provides transparency of team priorities and accountability for task performance.
It is a perfect tool for remote work enabling cross-functional cooperation within a team by synching tasks in a dashboard on a daily basis. With Parabol, you can:
plan the day/week,
mark the milestones upon a task completion (for monitoring the team progress),
edit org charts
send retrospectives (‘summary of a meeting’) email to your team
I Done This
It is a tool suitable for remote teams of any size. It is of particular interest to managers who can monitor top team accomplishments in real-time, and, hence, save tons of time on holding meetings.
Applying this software, your team gets access inside the app to:
commenting on their tasks,
generating word clouds marking the most frequent task components,
notifications of a reminder email (‘What have you done today?’) for sharing the daily accomplishments
"visuals," which breakdown accomplished tasks with color coding
Monday
Suitable for any team size, it is a tool that will let you plan your tasks on a timeline so that nothing will fall between slots, point assignees and, thus, enhance accountability, and collaborate instantly for increased business productivity.
The featured Monday options that you will surely like include the opportunity:
to update the status on the task,
to choose a customizable template for your sprints from the impressively big selection,
Email notifications – get notified by email
Clarizen
It is a team management solution designed to facilitate remote team collaboration. The software provides instrumental features to unite resources for more productive planning.
Implementing this tool means that your team can apply:
reporting templates,
creating their own dashboards,
tracking tasks of various kinds in real-time
adjusting the time and resource allocation to current business goals in terms of project profitability
Quip
It is a productivity suite that unites spreadsheets and documents into the shared folders.
It is perfect in terms of goal settings for your remote team. It facilitates collaboration by sending reminders and instant sharing documents from one place. Your team will not have to dig deep to retrieve the documents.
Quip is accessible across any device so that you and your team can work from any place. Applying Quip, you can create:
Project plans
Territory plans
Checklists
Meeting notes
You can work over multiple projects: the sidebar is available from any screen in Quip so you can easily access your work, your favorites, and your teammates.
Source: https://www.troopmessenger.com/blogs/online-collaboration-tools
Below there is a list of 10 ultimate team collaboration tools you will find useful when working with a remote team. Lack of effective tools, however, might hinder the productivity of your team so making the right choice in terms of software that would empower the team collaboration, will save you from facing numerous challenges.
