With the advances in technology, the ways in collaborating with an ever-more diverse and distributed team members has come in so many ways— from productivity platforms to communication apps, we can no longer count the apps we’ve experimented on, but we can list down the ones that have stuck with us effectively for so long.
We always take it as an initiative to give team members the opportunity to shape the culture and environment of your company by sharpening our focus before a big meeting. Decision Jam is a web app we built to make and vote on decisions that matter to us. It’s simple and very easy to use, works even in remote collaboration situations.
Decision Jam encourages solutions-oriented thinking and it helps us sharpen our focus before a big team meeting–where the real collaboration is.
Slack has become a household name as long as internal communication is concerned. Slack is a real-time messaging app and it continues to provide our team a great space to discuss things [personal or professional] freely on their own time.
We love how it also integrates well with many different tools the team is currently using (e.g Trello, Evernote etc.). We also have dedicated channels and private groups to discuss potential clients, projects, team trips, marketing, design, development, DOTA and so on.
We can also share files with our teammates by dragging and dropping them into the right channel without cluttering a teammate’s email inbox.
Keeping each team member in-sync with project goals with crystal clear tasks and timelines is the difference between growth and saturation. And yet, keeping everyone on the same page is another thing easier said than done.
When it comes to streamlining tasks, we figured there’s not an app that’s a one-size fits all. For our designers, they trust Evernote to keep track of design revisions and their creative notes. Other project teams find Trello the easiest to use, while others prefer MeisterTask.
Some things are easier discussed face-to-face rather than typed out in lengthy messages, and we can't all be in the same physical space at the same time so we use these tools for that.
What's great with Google Meet especially with client digital meetings is that the links to the calls are automatically generated when creating a calendar invite, so you don't have to worry about preparing the call room and sending the link to the client before the actual call every time.
We also love Zoom's feature of recording calls, especially when the call is something we have to review or do a retrospective on after.
We've only been using Discord for a few days as of time of writing because the entire team is working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's working great for us so far and you might want to try it too.
Discord is mainly designed for video gaming communities that uses text and voice channels for the members to communicate with each other.
With an agreement where all of us have to be in audio channels while we're working (constantly updating if we'll go Away From Keyboard), we can easily talk to each other when we need something to collaborate. We also love how we can quickly stream our screens when we need to show our teammates to instruct or ask help.
Do you have other collaboration tools you use with your team especially in remote working situations? Share it to us!
Learn more about our team here.
