Collaboration tools are the new productivity hacks in today’s global village. But, as an entrepreneur, how are you leveraging collaboration tools for your business? Collaboration tools help your business organisation to adapt and survive the increasing workplace challenges of today following everyday disruptions and innovation.
Employees and work teams can now connect seamlessly and brainstorm ideas without hindrance regarding locations or time zones. And this has unleashed tremendous capacity for organisations to become more efficient and productive.
I will share with you in this article 10 great collaboration tools for businesses, tools designed to empower and energise your teams to work productivity. So, let’s dive in. But, before we start, we will discuss how to choose these collaboration tools.
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How To Choose Collaboration Tools For Your Business
Consider the following criteria below when choosing a collaboration tool for you and your team.
Look For Ease Of Use
Ease of use is crucial when choosing a tool for your team collaboration. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if a service works, it must be easy to use. No, often, it does not turn out that way.
If a collaboration tool requires a steep learning curve, it will not help your team, especially if you have a rapidly expanding team. To forestall this, you should request a software demo and ensure it has an intuitive and simple navigation interface.
The Multi-functional, The Better
Multi-functional collaboration tools will naturally offer you more value than standalone tools. And always remember that no matter how excellent a particular tool is, if it is not maximising efficient use of time and capital, it cannot be considered overall efficient.
It is better to go for tools with rich features that allow your people to use them in many different ways. For instance, a project management collaboration tool with an inbuilt video conference capability for communicating with your team will help improve your team efficiency more than a standalone tool.
Privacy Means Safety. Prioritise Security
Teams’ collaboration involves tons of information flowing back and forth between the different teams working together; hence the issue of data security is a top priority.
Make sure you consider privacy before choosing and signing up. It would be best if you went for tools that guarantee you and your team members adequate data privacy cover.
Go For The Cloud And Stay There
Cloud-based technology collaboration tools for businesses have many advantages over offline ones. And these include cloud-based data storage and real-time communication, among others.
Online-based collaboration tools trump offline tools on many fronts, so go for the best – go for cloud-based tools.
Integration And Compatibility Are Also Important
No single collaboration tool will likely give you all the functionalities your team requires. Hence the need to consider integration and compatibility capability issues when choosing a particular tool.
Consider tools that seamlessly integrate and are compatible with other apps or software that will be deployed within your team network. For instance, compatibility implies that your collaboration tools should also support all the file types your team usually uses.
Collaboration Tools For Businesses
1. Asana
This cloud-based customisable workplace content management system allows businesses to collaborate, communicate, manage and organise their tasks and projects. Asana is the preferred collaboration and workplace management platform for millions of people in many countries of the world. It is versatile and can be used by teams like sales, operations, marketing, product design, remote, etc.
Five Key Categories of Asana.
Project management: Ready-to-use templates for work requests, project planning, meeting agenda, and team goals.
Communication: Communication via task comments, project conversations, status updates, and announcements.
Views: Multiple work views for visualising tasks and projects, so you always see the big picture: board view, list view, timeline view, and calendar view.
Team management: Essential project features for managing resources, tasks, dependencies, due dates, and milestones.
Integration: Integration with tools such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Slack, etc.
2. Slack
Slack is a popular instant messaging and collaboration tool for businesses of all sizes. Slack is synonymous with business communication and has more than 10 million users worldwide.
This collaboration tool combines all work communication in one platform, with multiple features that include direct messages, group messages, voice calls, video calls, etc.
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With Slack, you can:
- Organise and manage secure communication through dedicated, searchable channels for individual projects, teams, or topics
- Communicate with your team members through instant messaging, voice, and video calls
- Collaborate with clients or teams at other organisations by sharing channels with them.
- Share documents and files
- Connect and integrate other business tools like Zoom, Asana, Salesforce, Google Calendar, etc.
3. Hive
Hive is a productivity platform for managing fast-moving work teams and one of the collaboration tools for businesses. It brings all aspects of your work into one single dashboard. Using Hive, team members can communicate in real time, collaborate on schedules and manage their to-do lists. In addition, they can share files and monitor and document the latest project progress.
This tool is an excellent option for business teams of all sizes. It features native chat, email integrations, and collaborative notes that help team members stay on top of their game while working on a project.
4. Monday.com
Monday.com is a cloud-based work operating system platform that enables teams to run projects and workflow confidently. This collaboration platform offers flexible task planning and monitoring solution for teams of various sizes and functions like marketing, HR, real estate, sales, e-commerce, logistics, etc.
Features
Dashboards: Simplify decision-making with real-time insights with customisable boards for managing workflows, projects, and everyday tasks.
Automations: Save time and leave repetitive work behind using code-free automation to minimise human error incidents.
Files: Add context to your tasks by uploading any file type.
Integrations: Keep your business tools all in one place by integrating with various apps like Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Dropbox, Mailchimp, etc.
Gantt Charts: Visualise project milestones and dependencies.
Docs: Turn words into workflows and collaborate in real-time.
5. Zoom
Zoom is a secure and reliable video communication platform that powers your business communication needs, including meetings, chat, phone, webinars, and online events.
The video communication online platform, Zoom, is a great collaboration tool that became instrumental in the workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. And as of today, the platform is currently a leading video conferencing tool on the market.
This collaboration tool is straightforward to use. To start a video call, create a Zoom meeting in the app on your mobile device or online using a desktop version, and share the link with your attendees. What’s more? Zoom is free for calls under 40 minutes and with 100 participants.
Features of Zoom
- Chat with individuals and groups within meetings.
- Interactive meeting features, including filters, reactions, polls, hand-raising, & more.
- Breakout rooms for splitting large calls into smaller, more manageable groups.
- Integrations with thousands of other tools and apps.
- Meeting recording and transcription.
6. Hugo
Hugo is a cloud-based and integrated meeting notes platform. This great collaborative tool helps businesses of all sizes to create, organise, and share meeting notes and agendas across various applications, thereby aiding and improving teams’ workflow process and efficiency.
With Hugo, teams are given a centralised place to store and manage their meeting notes while collaborating in real-time during note-taking and editing. Tasks can also be assigned to specific handlers for actionable next steps and follow-up.
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Features of Hugo
- Access Controls/Permissions.
- Action Item Tracking.
- Agenda Management.
- Attendee Management.
- Calendar Sync.
- Collaboration Tools.
- Document Management.
- File Sharing.
- Integrates with over 20 tools, including Slack, Zoom, etc.
7. Narrato
Narrato workspace is a content creation, collaboration, workflow, and project management platform that brings all your content processes and people on a single dashboard.
This content collaboration platform offers editor tools to create high-quality, SEO-friendly content, assign tasks to team members and get feedback/approval from clients on the platform based on the level and quality of work done.
Key Features of Narrato
- Content project management which includes task assignment, tracking, and management.
- Advanced content editing with AI writing assistant, readability, grammar, and plagiarism checker. SEO content briefs and keyword optimisation support.
- Content calendars and boards for planning and folders for content curation.
- Custom content templates.
- Publishing support – Workflow automation.
- Content ideation tools.
- Client content delivery, feedback, and collaboration.
- Free image search and graphics with Canva integration.
8. MindMeister
MindMeister is an online knowledge-based collaborative digital mind mapping tool that anyone can use to understand and make connections between concepts, ideas, and information. This collaborative tool is perfect for everyday business situations.
With this tool, you can start your mind mapping journey with the main idea in the centre of your mind map. You can create unlimited subtopics, explore your thoughts, and colour code for clarity and style. As your map shapes, you can add context to topics with attachments, embedded media, and more.
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Key Features Of MindMeister
Beautiful Themes: Explore MindMeister’s expertly-designed themes to add colour and style to your maps – improving readability and comprehension.
Templates: Choose the layout that best suits your needs. Explore our predefined mind map templates: a map for every occasion!
Connections: Show relationships between any two mind map topics. Customise your connection line’s style, shape, and start/endpoints.
Individual Topic Styling: With custom topic styling options, make each topic stand out. Customise the fill and stroke, shape and more.
Attachments: Context without the clutter. Attach files to maps from local storage, or link out to documents, articles and more on the web.
Brainstorm Mode: Launch collaborative brainstorming sessions with your team. Let your creativity flow, then add comments and reactions!
Embedded Media: Enhance your mind maps with embedded multimedia attachments in map topics, including videos, images, gifs and links.
9. Wrike
Wrike helps its users manage projects from start to finish by providing full visibility and control over outlined tasks. As a cloud-based collaboration and project management platform, it supports end-to-end solutions by taking projects from initial requests to tracking work progress and reporting results.
Wrike is a versatile and scalable collaboration tool for teams and organisations of all sizes. And it is used by thousands of customers all over the world.
Features of Wrike
- Organized File Management.
- Seamless Communication.
- Collaborative Editing.
- Easy Time Tracking.
- Reporting Using Real-time Data.
- Visual Timelines.
- Resource Management.
- Customisable Workflows.
10. Visme
Visme is a web-based content creation tool that helps individuals and teams translate data into engaging content through presentations and infographics. The tool is easy to use regardless of your creative expertise level.
This tool comes with customisable presentation and infographic templates that you and your team members can edit to add other forms of content – video, audio, or voice recording from inside the editor. You can also add third-party content and set your preferred background colours.
And finally, your project output can be published online, embedded on a website, shared on social media channels or downloaded as a PDF or image file.
Features of Visme
- 3D Objects.
- Access Controls/Permissions.
- Activity Dashboard.
- Activity Tracking.
- Animation.
- Audio File Management.
- CAD Tools.
- Collaboration Tools.
On a final note, the above-listed collaboration tools are by no means exhaustive. Have you used any of these collaboration tools? Please share your experience with us in the comment. You can work with us to grow your business. First Ask An Expert. We will start from there.
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One Response
Thank you. Really good tools!