Learn here how using an online team collaboration tool can keep your team organized, focused and lead them to productivity.

Collaboration is defined as “the action of working with someone to produce something.”

Broadly speaking, it is teamwork. When collaboration is implied across the team, it leads to big positives such as focused employees, streamlined operations, ease of work and productivity. 

In recent times, keeping your team organized and on the same page is quite challenging, thanks to the remote and geographically isolated teams. 

How to ensure team collaboration in such a scenario?
An online collaboration Tool is an answer. It lets employees work together on a project via a single platform, no matter where they are. These tools keep things organized with features like calendar planning, document collaboration, file sharing, task management, and reporting.

Here we will walk through some key advantages of using team Collaboration Tool for your business. But before this quick refresher about how these tools work.

How Collaboration Software Work?

The market is saturated with hundreds of collaboration tools. However, most of them come with a simple objective—to provide a centralized workspace where the information can be shared, accessed and reviewed. You can easily assign tasks and schedule them for different members and can keep track of the progress. Besides, these tools are generally equipped with instant messenger for quick communication. Some of them let you make a video call or can be integrated with video calling tools. 

Read Also: Why is a Design Collaboration Tool Essential to your Design Flow?

Let’s Resume To The Benefits Of Collaboration Software…

1.   Simplifying Team Communication:

Efficient and smooth communicate is key to the success of any project. It is important for a project manager to keep his team informed of important changes and goals of the project.

Besides, team members are required to make sure that their ideas are being shared. 

Going through calls, emails, snapshots, and messages makes the process cumbersome and confusing as well. And this is even more chaotic when the project is divided among multiple assigns at different locations. 

A single point of contact like a collaboration tool plays an important role here. 

With an effective collaboration tool, team members can share ideas, solutions, and messages on the same platform. Quality collaboration tools like Slack Hive and Cisco Spark come with important features to organize discussion into channels; support voice and video calls; collaborate with other apps and simplify navigation through documents. 

2.   Keeping You Top of Your Project:

Measuring progress on each task keeps you stay on top of your project. 

However, things may not always go as planned and that can hamper your projects. This is where effective team collaboration software comes in. It helps you know the pace and direction of your project. 

Many collaboration tools are equipped with a variety of tracking capabilities letting the involved assignees see the development of the project from day one. 

The tool helps you see the latest changes, notify a colleague for feedback and pass on important messages across the team. There is no need to communicate via emails as important messages can be sent or received via these tools. 

3.   Supporting Remote Work:

Video calls, emails, and communicators are widely used to manage remote projects. These tools facilitate the remote working of employees across the world. However, a collaboration tool has an upper hand when it comes to ensuring seamless coordination, sharing, and communication.

It lets remote employees work together on the same project. Slack is one of the popular collaboration tools and is considered as a virtual office where your people can connect with their colleagues and get instant feedback. This way, you can get the job done, no matter where your employees are working from. 

4.   Facilitating Scheduling:

Efficient scheduling ensures orders and keeps the process inflow. This is because your team knows what they’re supposed to perform and can concentrate on their tasks. Besides, they are aware of the deadline. Luckily, this is also one of the benefits of a collaboration tool.

For example, team members can share calendars to track all deadlines and important tasks allotted for a day. These tools let you schedule or view the tasks even on the run.

5.   Making Reporting Easy:

Reporting is an important part of nearly all work projects. However, it can’t be denied that it is a stressful task despite being an important part.

You are more likely to lose track of some of the tasks that have been done for a certain project, especially when a large team is involved with it. 

By utilizing a quality collaboration tool, you can generate detailed reports that include all of the tasks related to a certain project, saving you time and hassle. 

6.   Speeding Up the Process:

With a quality collaboration tool, there is no longer a need for organizing a meeting or phone call to assess the documents. These tools can be used to upload documents, and the assessors can be informed via email that documents have been uploaded.

They can then download the document so that they can make edits and notify all assignees that the document has been proofed and is ready.

This way, the tool keeps the workflow streamlined and organized. 

7.   Keeping All Things in a Single Place:

Collaboration tools keep all documents in a single place, regardless of their location.

It eliminates the need for storing data separately on cloud, emails or using a USB stick, especially if the team members have to work on them remotely. The files can be easily viewed, shared, accessed, reviewed and tracked for changes. 

8.   Bridging the Gap between You and a Global Talent:

With a collaboration tool, you can work with other professionals across the world. Just share your dashboard with them to turn them into your remote employees.

As an added bonus, there is no need to pay for their travel expenses or relocation as they can work from any place. Plus, you are not bound to give them employees benefits set by your state employment law. 

9. Schedule Meeting or Training from Anywhere:

Team collaboration software not only simplifies your workflow but also lets you conduct meeting and training from anywhere. For example, you can organize an online training session with your remote employees, thereby saving travel costs. To meet this purpose efficiently, make sure to choose the tools that come with video conference services.

A collaboration tool can also be used to conduct training sessions about your company’s products and services. Therefore, you can display the positives of your inventories to a remote prospectus and expand your customer base. 

Bottom Line:

It makes organizing tasks as well as team collaboration fast and more efficient. However, make sure to choose the one that meets your requirements.

Some tools are too basic to address your needs while some tools have the feature you may not use ever. Some of the important features to look for in a collaboration tool are:

• Shared calendar to plan your activities for a day with others. Real-time chat feature for collaboration and communication.
• File synchronization for making two versions of the same file identical.
• An ability to integrate with other tools like Gmail, Skype, and Drive.
• A file-sharing option.

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