When it comes to collaboration for your business, effective communication is crucial. However, if your employees or clients are scattered across the state or globe, communication can be a logistical nightmare thanks to time-zone differences, varying technical expertise and equipment, alternate schedules, and more. And you miss out on regular, impromptu face-to-face updates and feedback sessions.
You can’t expect employees to be on the phone all day, fielding texts and responding to video calls that spike their data-usage. Even if everyone is in one location, you can’t interrupt employees every time a thought pops into your head or fill their inboxes with email. Interruptions, whether in the form of a quick visit, call or email, kill productivity. And messages sent only between two people exclude other stakeholders, and teams often operate in a vacuum where information is not shared with everyone quickly enough.
Thankfully there are many communication tools on the market to stay connected with employees and clients. Here are some of today’s most popular options:
Slack
Slack allows you to organize team conversations and coordinate documents in open channels based on a specific project or topic. You can grant access to your entire team or specific individuals. For example, if you own an architecture firm, you could offer your clients transparency on most aspects of a project, but set up a private group for information for employees’ eyes only.
Perhaps most useful however, is that everything you place in Slack—whether a message, file or a notification—is automatically indexed and archived, making it easy for you to search and locate files when you need them.
The basic version is free for unlimited users. Packages starting at $6.67 per user per month offer more features.
Trello
This mobile-friendly app is perfect for teams that need instant feedback, such as medical staff. Using the easy drag-and-drop feature, create, modify and share lists as needed so you and your team can see everything about your project—including real-time updates—by glancing at your board. Create checklists, assign labels and due dates, and upload files easily from a computer, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box or OneDrive.
You can add as many people and create as many boards as you want with the free version. For a business or team, you will likely want to upgrade to the Business Class version, starting at $3.75 per user per month.
Flow
Everything happens in real-time with the Flow interface. Participants can even see when others are typing a response. In addition, all discussions and document management happens within a task, so you can keep all related discussions and files in one place, essentially eliminating long, time-consuming email chains. Flow also makes resource management simpler because users can easily see what everyone is working on, making it easy to delegate work, schedule meetings and so on.
Try it free for 30 days; plans start at $19 per month for up to three people.
DropBox for Business
While DropBox doesn’t offer messaging and other features, it is a fantastic tool for teams who need to share many files, particularly files too large to email.
Anything a team member saves in DropBox on their computer is automatically updated on everyone else’s computer. This eliminates the risk of an employee working from outdated files, because the newest version is saved to everyone’s computers.
Free trial; packages start at $12.50 per user per month, starting with 5 users.
JIRA
Built specifically for software teams, JIRA allows your team to prioritize projects, create milestones, set deadlines, and assign work so everyone knows the status of projects and what to work on. In addition, JIRA automatically sends notifications to the HipChat room so everyone is always in the know about changes. As an added bonus, JIRA offers more than 800 add-ons for further streamlining and managing your team.
Packages start at $10 per month; you can test it with a free trial.
Even widely dispersed teams can collaborate, stay connected and work efficiently on projects by harnessing the power of technology. The options listed above all offer a free version or trial, so you can test them out risk-free and determine which one is the right fit for your business.