Best Communication And Collaboration Tools For The Work From Home Era
Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, remote work was on the rise. Now, after over a year of social distancing and pandemic lockdowns, the work-from-home era is in full swing. And businesses around the world are scrambling to adjust to this new reality.
The speed at which remote work policies must be adopted has left many companies in the lurch as they struggle to adapt to the massive shift in how to work now gets done.
While there is no cheat code for unlocking seamless integration of remote workers, there is a whole slew of online tools, help teams work together no matter how far apart they are.
Here are some of our favorite communication and collaboration tools that help businesses make the most of the work-from-home era.
Heralded as a powerful force in the democratization of software development, GitHub is an incredible collaboration tool. While it may generally be considered a coding tool, GitHub is surprisingly versatile for a variety of projects with multiple contributors.
GitHub’s primary focus is on version control and maintaining a record of changes made over time. With GitHub, users can contribute to projects by creating a fork (or a personal copy) while adding their modifications before submitting the new version for review and feedback from the rest of the team.
This allows granular changes to be made with ease while ensuring every change is tracked. This way, mistakes can easily be discovered and fixed or reverted with a simple click of the mouse.
Google Docs
Google Docs is an all-in-one platform that offers a variety of apps — all of which allow for collaboration and live, real-time editing by multiple simultaneous users. Google Docs includes Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms apps that allow users to create, collaborate, and share a variety of document types.
Google Docs is a word processor similar in functionality and purpose to Microsoft Word. Google Sheets is Google’s answer to Excel. And Google Slides is their take on PowerPoint. Forms, on the other hand, doesn’t really have a direct Microsoft analog but is used for creating and distributing questionnaires.
All of the apps on the Google Docs platform allow for teams to work simultaneously or provide asynchronous feedback via in-line commenting and editing tools.
Slack
Slack advertises itself as a replacement for business email, and it performs that role admirably thanks to its fantastic features and ease of use.
Slack functions as a digital headquarters for your organization where physically distant team members can come together to work and socialize. For many modern businesses working in today’s remote world, Slack has become a gathering place, functioning as a digital water cooler.
Slack also enables productivity and easy-to-track communications so nothing ever gets lost in the shuffle. All of the conversations held in Slack can be searched, helping you to find the piece of information needed quickly — while maintaining everyone’s sanity and productivity.
Zoom
Zoom quickly became the default video conferencing tool once the COVID outbreak proved to be a problem that was here to stay — for at least some time.
Zoom’s sudden and extravagant popularity across the globe happened for good reason: its accessibility and simplicity. Zoom, unlike most of its competitors, was designed with usability as a guiding tenet from day one.
Zoom makes it incredibly easy to host and join video calls with up to 100 concurrent users, sharing video at the same time. And it manages this while providing a simple interface and easy access to the platform that doesn’t even require users to set up an account to attend a Zoom meeting.
Trello
Trello is designed for managing teams and projects to keep everyone on the same page and ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.
Inspired by the Kanban project management system, Trello uses lists and cards to organize tasks and projects into an organized board, allowing for detailed project oversight at a glance. Trello functions essentially as a to-do list that creates an overview of how a project is coming along. Additionally, you can track and assign specific tasks, helping you and your team to stay on top of to-do items.
Trello allows users to assign tasks and deadlines, using colored labels and a simple, easy-to-read user interface that makes keeping tabs on workflow a much easier task.
Making Work From Home Work for You
This list is by no means exhaustive. There are countless tools available today and even more in development to help facilitate a business’ transition to the work-from-home era in which we’re now living.
Communication and collaboration are essential for humans to tackle the tasks that they can’t accomplish on their own. Finding the right tools can make all the difference as your organization adapts to whatever comes next. So, take some time to find the tools that will help your team put their best foot forward.
And if you need any help adding temporary or permanent remote developers to your team who understand the importance of communication and teamwork, get in touch with us today to learn how Upstack can help.
Interested in scaling your team with top 1% tech talent around the world? We’re here to help you — CONTACT US!
Originally published at Upstack.co on Dec 27, 2021, by Charlie Harper.
