5 Must-Have Tools for Remote Collaboration

5 Must-Have Tools for Remote Collaboration

Gone are the days when you have to rent a place, set up an office space, hire people from the same city to run a business. Now it’s an era of working remotely—the hype of digital nomads. Whether you work as an employee or run your own business, you can get the job done from the comfort of your home. However, there are few limitations to working remotely, especially when it comes to communicating and collaborating with your team.

If you’re running a remote business, your team must be spread around the world, and although nothing beats in-person meetings, one has to adjust. Therefore, it’s necessary to seek good communication tools that can keep your business effective, creative, and fun. Whether you run an SEO agency, a logistics company, or an online store, here are the five must-have tools for working and managing your team remotely:

Mural

Online workshops can be fun if you use the right tools, and Mural is definitely one of them. It is a remote whiteboard that functions as a collaborative space where you can log your team and enable them to share ideas during an online session.

With Mural, you can create sticky notes, upload images, and draw. The facilitator has a lot of tools to manage the workshop, like timed sessions and voting sessions, where you can give each participant the option to vote on an issue and then present the results.

Whereby

Whereby is a video conferencing tool. It is an easy-to-use app that is similar to most of the tools you probably know, and that’s what makes it great. You can open rooms and invite a few people. Login is not required, and you can manage the meeting with minimal effort. It is recommended to use Whereby not only for its simplicity but also for in-studio meetings.

Whereby offers free accounts and has a fair licensing model. If you need to record your meetings, you will need to go pro and add the recording capabilities. The pro or premium account is around $15. However, if you are required to run more robust meetings with more than two or three participants, you should use Zoom—our next must-have tool.

Zoom

Zoom is a great tool for running quality video conferencing. It is packed with a range of features, which you can customize to fit your needs. For example, Zoom has neat recording capabilities, which are great if you are running meetings you need to go back to.

You can also use it for brief meetings and work handover. Once the meetings are done, you and your customers can go back and revisit what you discussed, and that is pretty important. Note that if you run meetings that include more than two participants, you will have to upgrade your account or limit the meetings to only 40 minutes.

Calendly

One of the biggest challenges in remote meetings is scheduling. Calendly is a simple-looking tool, but it has a lot of options. For regular meetings, you just need to send a link to the other person, and they can select a calendar opening that is good for them. It automatically syncs to your calendar, so you don’t need to worry about double-booking or overlapping meetings.

You can do more things with Calendly. With its round-robin feature, you can enable customers to schedule meetings with some members of your team. For example, if you have four sales reps, the customer can select a meeting from all four calendars, and the app will assign the meeting to one available sales rep. You can also make meetings that require more than one person in your team. Calendly will offer your counterpart to select only slots that all your internal teams are available in.

Figma

online business setup

Figma is an online design tool. With this tool, you can design prototypes and systems, design banners, and landing pages. It is a vector-based tool, like Sketch and Illustrator. But Figma was the first design tool to provide real-time collaboration between design professionals. This has transformed the way teams work, as well as the way you could work with clients.

 

Figma also allows you to share designs in real-time. It enables co-authoring and commenting on designs. You can create live interactive prototypes and utilize them for user testing. There are many prototyping and design tools available today, like AdobeXD, Invision, and Axure. However, Figma is the most collaborative platform. And if you want to work remotely on designs, this is your tool.

 

Use these tools, and you’ll likely have a smoother workflow with your colleagues, no matter where they are.

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