Five Best Collaboration Sites to Use With a Remote Team
By: Kristin Park
Tags: Efficiency, Zoom, Slack, Github, Remote Working

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Work isn’t the same as our parents’ generation. Younger generations have collectively determined that flexibility is more important than stability. They would rather work from the comfort of their own home or the latest exotic destination with internet access rather than the confines of a cubicle. We don’t blame them. After all, if you can do it, why wouldn’t you? The current changes happening now may have been made long ago if it had been possible.

Companies today are offering flexibility perks like working from home, unlimited holiday time, shortened work weeks, etc. Others have opted to hire entirely remote teams for certain aspects of their business.

If this is a world you want to delve into, it’s important to have the right tools for communication and collaboration. The idea is to address the reasons people need to go into an office in the first place while allowing room to be location-independent. Basically, they need to be able to talk together and share a workspace they can make notes on. Here are five excellent resources, in no particular order, to help you build or improve upon your remote teams:

1. Slack

When it comes to communication Slack has you covered. Using this site, you can organize conversations into channels organized by project, topic, team, or any way that makes sense for the work at hand. Conversations are searchable, so you’ll never have to worry about forgetting what channel that conversation you had with your marketing manager is located on.

Worried about security? Slack is, too. That’s why they offer 2FA and SSO to keep prying eyes out. Tired of having to continuously update your status so your team doesn’t think you’re slacking in a different way than the name implies? No problem. You can sync your Outlook calendar so it will let your team know when you’re in a meeting or at lunch. It’s like having an assistant!

You can also incorporate Gmail, Zoom, and Google Drive — among others — into the platform, so it’s all in the same space. It’s essentially like having an office online. For seamless communication, it’s hard to beat.

2. Zoom

Zoom is fantastic. This software allows users to make video calls similar to Skype, but there are more controls in place. For example, if you call a business associate and need to ask about some numbers in a spreadsheet, you can pull it up on your desktop and share just that screen or your entire desktop if you need to switch between Excel and a website. You can see who you’re talking to, a single colleague or a theatre full of people, while you all look at the work at hand.

What pushes it even further ahead of Skype is the ability to share a “whiteboard.” This is exactly what it sounds like, a white screen, just waiting to be written on. The annotation tools allow both you and the person you’re speaking with to type, highlight, draw, etc. You can even use a virtual laser pointer to draw attention to something without writing on it.

Note that you can also use these tools on any window you’re sharing or even your desktop. Better yet, you can pull in more than one person on the call. In fact, with the growing online education trend many universities are beginning to incorporate Zoom into the curriculum by using it for live lectures.

With all these capabilities, it makes you wonder why we need offices in the first place! Go ahead and hire your tech genius from South Korea. She’ll appreciate the perks of remote work as much as you.

3. Trello

Trello is a great way to keep everyone on track and productive. When working with a team that is not at arm’s reach, it can be hard to check in. As we often take cues and inspiration from those around us, it can also be more challenging to know exactly what our role is.

With its intuitive design, it feels like you’re staring at Marie Kondo’s progress board — or what we imagine it to be — with clean and simple boards, lists, and cards. Every place on the page has a clear purpose. As for sparking joy, well, that’s between you and your boss. Regardless of how you feel about a project, the first and most important part is defining each person’s role and the tasks they’re responsible for.

If that’s not enough to convince you of its value, here’s the best part: It’s free. Well, mostly. Options to upgrade to a paid version allow integration with an unlimited number of apps like Slack, Google Hangouts, Github, etc. and extra security features and customisation. For people who like to visualise progress, this is a must-have. You don’t even have to thank it first.

4. G Suite

For those who prefer the good ol’ classics and don’t care to learn anything new, G Suite can get you up and running pretty quickly. At its core, it’s the same setup you’ve used to send those pictures of the kids to your mom when the files are too large to go through email. Or to chat with your sister. Or maybe even to share a calendar with your spouse so someone is home to let Fido out before he soils the floor.

Google has done an excellent job of integrating itself into our everyday life, and G Suite takes the programs we know and love — Drive, Docs, Calendar, Gmail, etc. — and tweaks them for business, adding additional security and search functions, storage, and compliance capabilities.

Even without using the entirety of G Suite, Google Drive alone is worth incorporating into your workflow. File management doesn’t get any easier. Your entire remote team can access any file on the drive, so there are no excuses for not having that spreadsheet you needed to complete your sales projections for next year.

5. GitHub

For all of you coders out there, you might want to check this out if you’re not already using it. GitHub is like a time machine for your code. You can jump forward and back through your coding history because every change you make is recorded. Think about it as being a self driving AI vehicle for your teammates’ code. You can smoothly merge their code changes without smashing yours. This is essential for rapid development as it will take more than one developer to build your empire.

The program is set up around “branches” to allow more than one piece to be worked on at any given time, increasing efficiency and teamwork. As in most of the other programs listed here, all you have to do to get a coworker’s attention is to tag them. It will notify them and bring the part of the project or conversation to their focus. Loads of different tools are capable of being integrated in this as well, all readily available on GitHub Marketplace.

GitHub’s free plan is perfect for most users, but the company supports the idea of being open-source. So depending on your privacy needs, you may need to upgrade and throw some money into a paid plan.

There are many things to consider when setting up a remote team for the first time. The first thing you should ask yourself is, “Do I need my team to work in business hours in my time zone?” Depending on how you set up your teams, you may all be working in real time. If, however, you work across different time zones, always be ready with a time zone converter.

Oversight is one of the biggest concerns people have when they start hiring people they’ve never met face-to-face. You should create guidelines that allow you to measure progress. Maybe this means a conference call once a month. Maybe you use Processboard to create lists of tasks employees can check off when finished. Or perhaps you set consistent deadlines after which you look through the work and evaluate.

However you build your team, know that communication is key, and these programs will make it as easy as a chat over the water cooler.