Your employees are just as important as the product or service that your business offers. They are the backbone of your operation, and definitely one of the keys to your success. Your team should always be in sync so that they’ll remain efficient and effective in every task they handle. This is easier for employees working in the same office since they can interact with their teammates physically whenever they need to. But for startups with predominantly remote workers, this could be a challenge.
iDoneThis
When your teammates are in different zip codes or time zones, keeping track of accomplishments and achievements could be a hassle. You don’t have the luxury to just drop by their desk or office and get a quick update. You can set up a meeting, but finding a common time between remote team members would be another problem. With iDoneThis, you can enable your team to document their achievement for the day, so that you can easily track the progress of a project.
Another useful aspect of this program is that it gives you a recap of all the team’s activities yesterday in the form of a pop-up message in the inbox. Aside from monitoring team accomplishments, this could also be used by individual remote workers to check what they’ve done for a certain period. This could serve as a motivation to work harder, or just prioritize tasks which could be due soon.
Dropbox Paper
Paper is one of the latest products from Dropbox, and it is the perfect collaboration tool for a remote workforce. In essence, it’s like a shared workspace that allow participants to create, review, and organize projects. It is perfect for conceptualizing ideas, because it gives your team members the ability to comment on even the smallest detail of a project, be it an image in an album, a sentence in a word document, or a line of code that needs to be changed.
This is a useful tool for collaboration because the comments on a project are threaded, in order to keep track of the members’ contributions. Paper is a very flexible workspace, as it supports words, pictures, videos, and even codes. Users can even use stickers and emojis to comment on projects they’re working on, just like chatting with friends in a messaging platform. No matter what industry you’re in, you can definitely find ways to make use of Paper to promote teamwork.
Perhaps one of the best features of Paper is that it’s owned by Dropbox, the authority in file storage and sharing. This means everyone can see and just add Dropbox files in a Paper project you are working on, and the changes made to them are updated in real time. Speaking of real time updates, every team member with access to the Paper project can see who added or edited the document. They are also notified when changes are made, so keeping track of changes as well as contributions to the project is relatively easy.
RingCentral Glip
The best way to ensure that your remote employees really work as a team is to give them a reliable communication channel. Gone are the days where emailing is the only way to reach out to a teammate when he or she is out of the office. With the right set of tools, work-related communication can be efficient and effective, even for remote employees. This is what RingCentral’s Glip brings to the table: it is a team messaging and collaboration platform that comes packed with productivity tools to make remote work easier.
To start off, Glip can be used on your computer and on mobile devices, so real-time messaging doesn’t have to be just in front of your desktop. Its overview page states that it aims to end scatter discussions and disjointed resources brought about by emails. True enough, Glip is really capable of replacing email as the main mode of communication at work. Within the platform, users can share conversations, files, tasks, and calendars.
Another teamwork-focused feature of Glip is the built-in task and project management system wherein users can create and review tasks, set and edit deadlines, and update the status for everyone to see. And since this was built into a robust messaging platform, you can always message your teammates for updates and follow-ups.
The best part about this is that since Glip was acquired by Glip, RingCentral Office business phone system subscribers get the $5 Basic Glip plan for free as well. It has all the features from the Free plan but with more video chat minutes and premium support.
Francis has been writing for more than a decade now, focusing on Digital Marketing in the last couple of years. He is currently in charge of writing web-optimized content for RingCentral, an industry-leading cloud phone systems provider. Francis is also a voracious reader, spending most of his free time immersed on fictional worlds. You can reach him through Twitter.
