The Best Remote Team Collaboration Tools

Whether your company is fully or partly remote, choosing — and effectively using — appropriate collaboration tools can help maximize your team’s productivity, build a strong culture, and boost profitability. Discover some popular tools for team collaboration and consider how they could help maximize your remote team’s efficiency.

Smooth Remote Team Communication

Every team that includes remote workers can benefit from a tech-based communication tool that facilitates seamless, real-time communication between coworkers. Slack, for example, provides an easy-to-use desktop and mobile application that provides a communication experience not all that different from being in an office with coworkers.

Slack can boost productivity in a number of ways. It allows team members to see who is working at any given time, send instant messages, chat or ask questions via department or special interest channels, or even place voice and video calls. It can even be set up to allow team members to chit chat during break time, via a watercooler/general discussion channel. Slack can also be set up to sync with scheduling apps (such as Google Calendar) and video conferencing platforms (such as Zoom).

Visual Remote Workflow Tracking

Keeping track of projects and progress toward goals are important for every team. With in-office teams, managers often post a whiteboard or other type of tracking chart in their office or a shared work area. Tech-based collaboration tools like Trello, Airtable, Jira, or other project management applications accomplish the same thing, but in a virtual space. They allow remote teams to track the flow of tasks or projects in real-time, every step of the way.

With this type of tool, a team member can open a task, leave notes or details, and even upload files. Other teams can comment, take responsibility, move tasks along to different steps in the procedure, assign to other people, etc. These tools can be easily customized for any type of project or procedure. Anyone on the team can log in to see where a project is in the workflow at any time. These tools make it easy for remote team members to visualize progress, then drill down to view relevant interactions and information added along the way.

Growing Your Remote Team

As your organization grows, you’ll likely need to add team members, which means interviewing to hire remote employees. User-friendly teleconferencing technology like Zoom makes it possible to effectively interview candidates remotely, from any location, without being limited to a basic phone call. Zoom, GoToMeeting, or other similar platforms work great for one-to-one interviews, as well as panel interviews.

When you utilize this type of collaboration tool for candidate screening, there’s no need to bring people in for in-person interviews, which can save time and money. Even for roles where it might be important to meet candidates in-person before making a final decision, early rounds of interviews can be conducted remotely. It’s much more cost-effective to bring in the final few candidates than a larger selection of interviewees.

Simplified Employee Set-Up

Of course, once you are ready to convert candidates to new hires, you’ll need to be able to manage the new hire set-up process efficiently and effectively. There’s a lot involved with getting new hires set up and ready to start working, but when you use Justworks for your HR needs, adding personnel doesn’t have to divert your attention away from building your business.

The Justworks platform streamlines setting up new employees, as well as making changes for existing employees. From electronic Forms I-9, to payroll setup and benefits enrollment, everything is easily accessible via a user-friendly online platform. If employees have questions, Justworks’ dedicated support professionals can be reached 24/7, via several communication methods.

Built-In Employee Training

Justworks also makes it easy to provide new hires and other employees with remote access to harassment prevention training. The platform includes a selection of compliance-related training modules that your team members may need to complete, based on what is required in the state or city where they work or to meet your organization’s learning and development objectives.

This saves you time and helps to ensure compliance. Having to research and meet the requirements of every location where your remote employees are based could be very time consuming. Instead, you can rely on Justworks to provide what’s needed for your employees to meet compliance training requirements.

Effective Virtual Onboarding

While new hire set-up and initial compliance training are typically handled early on in the new hire orientation process, the overall onboarding process continues well past that initial day (or first few days) of employment. Follow these virtual onboarding best practices to set up your newest team members for success as they transition to becoming fully functioning members of your growing small business or startup team!

Simplifying Payroll and Compliance

While your team members likely love working for your growing company, they’re also probably pretty fond of getting paid. Companies with remote workers often have team members working from a variety of different locations, each with its own compliance requirements. The Justworks platform takes the stress out of multi-state payroll set-up and processing.

No matter which state your remote employees are located in, their payroll data is entered via the Justworks platform, which features built-in compliance support. This tech-based HR solution enables smooth behind-the-scenes processing, including applicable state and federal filings and other payroll-related compliance documentation.

Collaborate Your Way to Remote Workplace Success

No startup or small business achieves its goals without collaborative efforts from a number of people. When your growing company includes remote employees, collaboration tools are essential to success. Building an effective remote team starts with hiring the talent your organization needs, but it’s also important to set the team up for success. Making wise use of the best remote collaboration tools and HR support services provides even relatively new or small businesses with a powerful competitive advantage. Choose the tools that will unleash the potential of your team. You just might be amazed by the results.