Others use team collaboration software like Slack, Google Drive, or even Discord to communicate with their remote work teams. A study by Harvard Business Review showed that around 40 percent of managers struggle to manage their remote workers effectively. For remote workers themselves, 17 percent claimed that communication and collaboration were the most significant struggles they faced with remote work. About 40% of managers don’t feel confident in their ability to manage and collaborate with their remote team, a Harvard Business School study found. And almost 20% of employees in a Buffer study say collaborating and communicating with their fellow team members is the most difficult part of working from home.

• Discord was originally popularized by gamers and primarily used for voice communication, but has recently become a popular tool for remote collaboration.
• PhotoAiD is an AI-based online service for taking biometric passport, ID, & visa photos with just a smartphone.
• All-in-all, Karma is an incredibly fun way for your team to show appreciation to each other for a job well done.
• Coda also has excellent support documentation & videos to assist businesses in making a smooth transition.
• Switchboard rooms let you upload any type of file, document, browser, and web app and categorize them into sections that make sense for your team.
• You can choose from any number of events to allow teams to bond when they’re together, from museum trips to hikes and more.

Your employees inevitably will run into remote roadblocks that make their work more difficult. That might be a headstrong human resources team or a non-responsive member of IT. Whatever the case may be, champion your employees and advocate on their behalf to eliminate obstacles. If an employee is showing up late to meetings or underperforming in a way that’s unlike them, don’t jump to critiques or reprimands. They might just need a little break, and your encouragement may give them the excuse they need to take it. For decades, culture has been shaped by interactions and engagement face-to-face in the office.

best practices for excellent remote team collaboration

These are our picks for the best remote-working tools that have made it easier for remote teams to soften the impact of moving from the office to home & stay connected. Document360 is a software-as-a-service platform that allows businesses to create a self-service knowledge base for their customers & employees. This helps to report the most important information about customer expectations from the knowledge base & how to improve it. This collaborative tool helps teams manage projects & tasks by setting milestones & tracking progress using an intuitive interface & custom statuses. Pukkateam has a novel method of bringing remote teams closer together.

For example, we know remote work can improve productivity and performance—but it doesn’t always translate to higher employee retention. If you aren’t getting much feedback, consider an anonymous option where employees can be a bit more candid without fear of repercussion. Yes, they’re committed to your business, but the more autonomy you offer them, the more likely they’ll care and contribute to your company. You’ll need some rules and overlapping schedules for meetings, but don’t create unnecessary rules.

( Remote Collaboration: Tools & Best Practices For Virtual Collaboration

Then, share documents asynchronously through file sharing services. You can work side by side through video on a shared product to ask questions and encourage productivity. Finally, carefully approach how and when you use messaging to ensure that you have time for focused work, while balancing team communication. Effective team collaboration remote collaboration is when people within an organization incorporate useful practices and common goals into their workflow to share knowledge and work toward team goals. Effective team collaboration can occur in face-to-face meetings and virtual meetings or on asynchronous timelines with document and file sharing and project collaboration tools.