Best Digital Tools for Collaborative Remote Work

Henry Ford once commented on the importance of effective collaboration when he said: “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

In today’s work environment, collaboration has never been more critical. As many business teams work remotely, keeping your employees connected and inspired takes extra effort. Ensuring that everyone stays engaged and works well in the work-from-home environment requires well-designed digital collaborative tools.

The following easy-to-use digital platforms will help ensure successful collaboration with your team from anywhere.

Dashlane

Remote work brings cybersecurity issues. You and your employees must use processes and products that safeguard the company computer system from intrusion. Remote team collaboration necessitates sharing access to the same platforms and tools. But it’s no longer prudent or safe to manually store passwords or use weak ones that someone could easily hack.

The first line of defense against cyber intrusion is requiring employees to use a password manager such as Dashlane to keep your company information safe. You and your employees only need to remember one master password, which unlocks a vault where all the passwords are safely saved, generated randomly, and changed regularly.

EmailAnalytics

This remote team management tool keeps track of email activity for your team. It’s a beneficial program for team leaders. EmailAnalytics shows how many emails each member of the group sends and email response times. 

If emails are a vital aspect of your company’s output, as is with many companies, this is a beneficial tool. The app provides daily, weekly, and monthly email reports with data for comparison. Armed with statistics, you can focus on improving email output.

Fluvid

When you and your team meet virtually and brainstorm, team members often come up with ideas worth preserving. Fluvid provides screen capture and recording for online streaming, ensuring that no bright ideas are lost.

Google Calendar

No remote team can run well without a shareable, accessible calendar. Google Calendar seamlessly integrates with Gmail, Drive, Contacts, Sites, and Meet so everyone on your team knows what’s coming up next and what to plan for.

Google Meet

Well-run meetings are a critical aspect of effectively running a remote workforce. With Google meet, you can get together amongst your staff and clients from anywhere, on any device, using video or voice with Google Workspace. 

This robust enterprise-grade video conferencing platform is available to anyone with a Google account. Either create an online meeting with up to 100 participants and meet for 60 minutes or upgrade to more advanced features and hold meetings with up to 250 internal and external participants and live stream to up to 100,000 viewers.

Google Sheets

Spreadsheets are a necessary aspect of running any business. Rather than emailing the information and reviewing remotely with your team, the Google Sheets web-based spreadsheet application provided within Google Drive offers a cloud-based architecture with AI features that enable you to collaborate with anyone, anytime, anywhere. Sheets is compatible with external systems such as Microsoft Office and integrated into Google’s secure infrastructure.

Google Slides

When it’s time to present an idea or project, Google Slides lets you create and edit polished presentations. No special software is required. You can work directly in your browser, and multiple team members can add to the slides simultaneously. You can access the platform from any device, and all participants can see changes made in real-time. The system also automatically saves every update made.

Instagantt

If you’ve tried some of the collaboration tools on the market featuring a lot of bells and whistles but have ended up confused and less productive than you’d like, consider Instagantt. 

This platform allows for keeping track of projects with specific features to help prevent confusion. The digital tool has all the necessities, including the ability to create tasks and subtasks and version tracking. You can also easily see the timeline, milestones along the way, and notifications and alerts.

InVision

Invision is a digital whiteboard that allows your entire team to brainstorm together. This prototype tool enables you to create interactive mockups for designs of all types. You can share the mockups with the whole team and clients. Everyone can discuss the plans made inside the app by leaving comments on the screen where you discuss the design.

Mailtrap

Remote collaboration often includes digital marketing to customers. If your emails are landing directly in spam, that’s a lot of wasted effort with no return. The Mailtrap tool features a fake SMTP testing server that lets you send your emails through a trial run before pushing them out to actual clients. 

The service also uses an algorithm that ranks your emails, giving them a spam score. Mailtrap offers suggestions for improving your emails, so the spam score is lower.

Slack

Working together as a unit remotely can be a challenge. Slack is a messaging app that connects you and your employees to needed information. With Slack, you can message anyone inside or outside of your organization. The app allows team members to work in dedicated workspaces known as channels. This facilitates real-time work and employees accessing information and working on their own.

By being organized into channels, employees can work on projects at any time and from any location. They can also ask questions and share updates within the channels, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. Everyone in your company has access to the same information within Slack, and you can share information with everyone at once. This allows for easy, seamless, quick decision-making.

Trello

Trello is a project management software that accounts for every step of remote work. The app enables users to collaborate by showing all tasks related to each project. Users can check Trello and quickly see the various tasks, who they belong to, and their current progress. 

Trello uses multiple tools, including boards, cards, and lists, that you can manipulate to make projects run smoothly. Users can move lists to boards and store finished tasks in the cloud or their profiles. Some functions in Trello include time tracking, organizing daily assignments, and vacation planning.

Troop Messenger

Since there’s no physical watercooler to chat around, it helps to have a digital workspace where employees can meet and discuss work. Troop Messenger provides a platform for meeting and collaborating with its entire host of tools, including instant messaging, file sharing, audio-video conferencing, and desktop sharing. 

Troop Messenger allows business owners and managers to monitor and manage interactions and provides a place to list tasks and agendas. There is also the capability of interfacing with customers.

World Time Buddy

If you work with teams located throughout several time zones, you know the headaches of trying to schedule meetings and collaborative work time. World Time Buddy does the calculating for you. This time convertor for distributed teams features a world clock and time zone converter that makes scheduling meetings simple and easy. 

For the first time in history, we are experiencing an unprecedented uptick in remote work across many industries. Today’s workforce and workplace look much different than just a few years ago. To successfully engage and motivate your remote team, it’s necessary to delegate. These digital tools will help you do just that.