Remote working the truth about collaboration tools

Andela has experts in:. Angular Data Engineering DevOps. Golang iOS Java. Teaming Out then moves to crowdsourcing collaboration internally, to developing co-elevating partnerships with suppliers and customers, to coaching collaborations with trusted counsellors in your executive and entrepreneurial network. Why not bring in leading experts from around the globe for five or 10 minutes to deliver bite-sized insights and expertise?

In a remote environment, all of this happens online where everything can be recorded, documented, captured, and shared, in real-time allowing for true peer-to-peer transparency and accountability. No more than ever we can go big, bold and global. After carefully observing the impact of team size on collaboration, candor, and psychological safety in virtual environments for more than a decade, we counsel not letting virtual breakouts exceed five members.

Today, when teams tackle strategic business issues or stress-test bold new ideas using practices such as Collaborative Problem Solving or Bullet Proofing, its best to use smaller groups of three or four.

Smaller groups are ideal to create the psychological safety needed for complete and fluid conversation and extraction of everyone's point of view. You need to be sure there is time for each voice to be heard, particularly given the propensity of introverts to allow extroverts to dominate.

With each additional member you add to the virtual room, productivity and communication. As an upper limit, five is the Ferrazzi Number for virtual discussions. Now, compare this to the body of research on the optimal size of physical teams, for example work by Robert Sutton, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University , and the answer is seven.

Empathy and close team bonds can be forged by showing vulnerability through practices like Personal Professional Check-in and Sweet and Sour. Using virtual breakout rooms and Candor Breaks helps introverts speak up in a way that they may not in physical settings. In short, we do not believe that for the sake of collaborating on bold decisions that physical meetings are innately better.

To date, our evidence suggests that physical meetings may only be better suited for social connections. Even traditional physical creative interactions like whiteboard and brainstorming sessions are being rendered in virtual environments in ways that offer advantages to office spaces.

The social-chemical advantage of physical proximity may not be as large as we tend to believe. Our research is ongoing. Hiding self-view in a short break-out session with three people can be a powerful forum for ideas. Now you can focus more deeply on the conversation and the people speaking.

We have found that this simple shift is a gamechanger for most people. Adapting to remote collaboration was no shock to the highest performing teams. They were already operating to a set of relational dynamics that allow bold ideas to flourish in an environment of candor and collaboration. They use remote technology — such as break-out rooms — to accelerate innovation and transform performance. Today, as we move into a new hybrid world of blended teams—a mix of remote and co-located team members—there is an opportunity to learn from their experience.

This is a BETA experience. By connecting your favorite apps together and moving data between them automatically, Zapier helps facilitate a strong remote work culture. Without this technology, managing a remote team would require a ton of manual effort. With 1, apps to choose from and a user-friendly interface, you can eliminate hours of tedious labor in just a few clicks.

Zapier has a 4. Bonus: You can now share your workflows with your teammates. Geographically distributed teams often find it difficult to schedule meetings that work for everyone.

World Time Buddy does the work for you. Simply add the locations of your teammates and then drag and drop the slider to find a good time to meet. The only downfall? The free version only allows you to coordinate between 4 locations. That said, the annual plan is super affordable. Jes Kirkwood is a results-driven marketing strategist with expertise in both demand generation and revenue expansion. Until recently, she led community marketing at Autopilot, one of the top 10 fastest growing SaaS startups of In her spare time, she helps female tech marketers grow their careers via marketHER.

Follow her work and her journey on Twitter. Teams The 9 best online collaboration tools for remote workers 4 min read. Link copied to clipboard. Friday is an asynchronous remote collaboration tool that works in conjunction with Slack or Microsoft Teams to organize conferences. You'll be able to hold fewer, better meetings while remaining connected to your team.

They may assist you in developing methods and structures for your communication, whether it's a daily iteration or a weekly group meeting. Crystal is a fantastic tool for getting to know your coworkers and learning more about them. You can know about the variances in style for every member of your remote team based on the outcomes. Crystal also provides Gmail and LinkedIn tools to help you see these personality traits.

RemoteHQ is an online workspace for remote employees that centralizes all of your team's heterogeneous tools, information, and conversations. Their power is the capability to make all of your team's online apps collaborative instantaneously using simply cloud storage, allowing everyone to work together in real-time.

With Miro 's online canvas, you and your team may work on multiple projects even if you're miles apart. Miro can be used in synchronous or asynchronous meetings if your teammates are in various time zones. The virtual whiteboard includes a plethora of capabilities that expand the variety of work possibilities. You can take charge of projects right from the start, all through to the finished product. You may add things like pictures to your projects and integrate them with other tool for keeping everything in one place.

Miro makes it simple for you and your team to exchange ideas with one another in real time and collaborate like you're all in the same room. One of the most successful methods to interact across teams is with Bit.

Bit's smart documents allow you to create collaborative documents by combining digital rich material. Bit is one of the most innovative methods for your team to work on communicating, project documentation, internal knowledge bases, customer material, and more. Github enables engineering teams to work on code in a structured manner from afar.

It's similar to version control, but with extra features and capabilities to help you build apps and distribute them faster.

The entire organization is also remote, and they offer one of the most detailed guidebooks on working remotely that you will discover. Because of its straightforward functionality, nice design, and graceful use, Basecamp is a common choice among managers, organizations, individuals, and agencies.

It enables users to effectively manage projects and interact with customers. EmailAnalytics is a performance tool that displays the email activity of your team.

You can see how long it takes for each member of your team to respond to emails on average, and also how many emails they send and receive per day. It is used by sales and customer care teams to track and enhance email productivity.

We suggest Time Doctor to organizations that require time tracking software. Companies with virtual workers, online marketers, software teams, and businesses with remote support workers will benefit from Time Doctor. Well-known corporations such as Apple, Home Depot, Verizon, and others use this platform as well. If you want to geek out on task organisation for your virtual workers, Todoist is the tool for you. It has all of the essential functions, such as tasks and subtasks, as well as the ability to create projects.

Several remote teams rely on ProofHub 's project management software to keep everything in one place. Team members can connect with their teammates and customers in a seamless manner. CallHippo is a virtual phone system that allows teams to communicate with one another and their clients from any location.

It equips sales and service personnel with the tools they need to engage with clients and increase customer satisfaction. This advanced call center management software connects teams via mobiles and computers. Troop Messenger is a small, medium, and large business's remote work solution. This low-complexity tool with high capability solves a variety of domain-specific issues.

Admins can add merchants, distributors, and freelancers as orange members who have limited access to the workspace. Hypercontext is a shared agenda tool that helps supervisors and their teams be more productive by bringing together quarterly priorities, regular meetings, and engagement metrics in one location.

Organize effective and meaningful meetings by providing topic starters and over goal examples. Krisp is a noise-canceling tool that lets remote workers and teams work more efficiently. It eliminates background noise on either side of the call, allowing you and your call listeners to take critical calls from wherever they are. CloudTalk is a renowned cloud-based call center software that allows your employees to operate from any location in the world. It has over 50 features that make customer service and sales teams' jobs easier.

Blink is a comprehensive solution for remote teams that improves communication and efficiency. As a mobile responsive and integrated medium of communication, it is intended to transform the employee experience. This allows your company to develop its own staff communication and collaboration solutions without requiring technological expertise. HubStaff will help you be more effective in making your time work for you.

You can monitor where workers spend their time and what projects they're working on at any particular time. Dialpad is an AI-powered web conferencing platform that includes a contact center, telephony, and video conferencing.

Your workforce can now make better communications from any device thanks to built-in Voice Intelligence, which includes capabilities like call translation and automated note-taking.

With seamless video communication, Whereby allows remote teams to stay productive. It's as simple as creating a room link, sharing all by email or chat, and that's it.