6 Great Collaboration Tools to Keep Your Workforce Connected

Friday, July 17, 2020

Teamwork is everything in business. Having a team that seamlessly communicates and collaborates helps you operate smoothly and achieve your goals. But when you have remote employees, especially in the wake of COVID-19, teamwork gets a whole new meaning.

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6 Great Collaboration Tools to Keep Your Workforce Connected
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Whether your entire workforce is working from home or you have employees in other parts of the world, you need to stay connected with them.

With proper corporate training software and collaboration tools, you can really take your teamwork to the next level.

1. ProProfs Employee Training Software

ProProfs employee training software screenshot

ProProfs Employee Training Software is one of the best online training platforms for corporate teams. It can be ideal for training your workers remotely.

If you want to create your own employee training courses from scratch, you can do it with ProProfs in minutes. You can upload any kind of training content, from documents and presentations to videos and quizzes.

If you have no existing content, you can take advantage of the ProProfs library that features 100+ customizable online courses. There are courses for HR, compliance, safety, OSHA, customer service, sexual harassment training, and more.

This platform also features 100,000+ customizable quizzes for assessing your trainees and boosting their engagement. They include scores and personality quizzes, which you can also embed surveys into the courses.

Managing your trainees is quite simple. You can check real-time stats and reports anytime to view their progress and ensure they comply with the regulations.

You can also make it much easier for them to learn and retain knowledge with integrated collaboration and knowledge-sharing tools. Those include FAQs, how-to articles, a knowledge base, manuals, discussion boards, help center, and more. You can create those resources on the platform, where they’ll be available 24/7.

2. Trello

Trello project management tool screenshot

Trello is a collaboration tool for project management. It’s designed in a way that helps you get more work done, as you can easily organize and manage all your projects.

It comes especially handy when most, if not all, teammates are working from home. It lets you see what needs to be done, when, and by whom, so you can ensure accountability, boost productivity, and improve performance.

Trello is all about boards and cards. Boards serve as separate projects, within which you can create lists of tasks to do, tasks that people are currently working on, and everything that’s completed.

Within each list, you can add cards with all the necessary information for completing the tasks, such as deadlines. You can also make notes, add attachments and comments, create checklists, and more.

Since every project is separate and all the tasks connect nicely, it all looks clean and even makes work fun.

What’s even more interesting, and quite useful, is the integrated AI-powered bot. Using it further automates your workflow, especially since you can set rule-based triggers for the bot to step in and boost productivity.

3. Slack

Slack communication tool screenshot

Slack is an excellent communication tool for helping your teammates stay in the loop. It makes all the other communication apps obsolete, as it’s specifically designed for businesses. That means it’s secure and makes business collaboration a breeze.

Instead of communicating in individual or group chats, you have channels. Think of them as chat rooms, each created for a particular team, project, or purpose.

For instance, you can create a channel for sharing important updates with the entire company. You can have separate channels for departments, as well as channels for external communications. Think of customers, partners, and other stakeholders.

But what makes these channels stand out?

You can use them to share files, review and approve documents, make audio and video calls, and share your screen during live sessions. These features can be useful with employee training too.

You can also send direct messages and follow conversation threads using hashtags.

Yet another great feature is the box that lets you search through conversations. Very time-efficient.

4. DeskTime

DeskTime time-tracking software screenshot

Are you worried that your employees are slacking? DeskTime can help you find out the answer.

It’s a time-tracking software solution for overseeing employees’ activities during business hours. If they’re chatting with friends or perhaps shopping online, you’ll instantly know.

Employees may perceive this as an invasion of their privacy, but in reality, it’s just a tool for encouraging them to be more productive. Hopefully, you won’t punish anyone if you catch them slacking, but rather help them eliminate distractions and focus better on work.

That said, DeskTime automatically takes screenshots of your teammates’ screens. It also lets you track the URLs, apps, and documents they’re accessing. You can also know when and for how long they take breaks.

However, they can use a private time option for taking a break to quickly do something private. DeskTime won’t track their activity during that time.

Speaking of breaks, you don’t want your team to burnout, right? This tool features a timer that you can set to remind your employees to take regular breaks for recharging their batteries. Pretty neat.

5. Zoom

Zoom video conferencing tool screenshot

Zoom was already a popular video conferencing tool, but it has exploded in the wake of the pandemic. With almost everyone working from home, companies have been utilizing it like crazy – and for a good reason.

It supports video conferences, letting you create Zoom rooms for video meetings. It also supports other online meetings, such as employee training and technical support.

You can also hold webinars, which is ideal for the pandemic lockdown. Your marketing doesn’t have to stop just because your entire team is cooped up at home.

You can record and transcribe all your web conferences and online meetings. Again, this is great for trainees, as they can access those resources anytime. Of course, there’s also the good old chat, supporting messaging across various platforms.

Zoom also allows you to share files, collaborate with interactive whiteboards during live sessions, and share your screen.

Another notable feature is an enterprise phone system that unifies your chats, phone calls, video calls, and online meetings.

6. Mailbird

Mailbird email software screenshot

Even if you use Zoom, Slack, and other collaboration tools, you’ll certainly still use email as well. Although email is a great communication channel, it can be very distracting at times. Mailbird can help you reinvent your email correspondence and focus on what matters.

It’s a very clean and easy-to-use app for keeping all your email accounts in one centralized place. What makes it different from other competitors? It’s a desktop app – but only for Windows.

Apart from unifying multiple inboxes, it also enables you to snooze specific emails. That way, you’ll receive only those with the highest priority during business hours.

You can also speed-read emails, search through attachments, preview attachments, and connect directly with your LinkedIn contacts from the app.

You can also customize your inbox layout, switch between dark and light themes, and change notification sounds.

Have you ever used any of these collaboration tools? Perhaps one of them is your personal favorite? We’d love to hear about your experience, so feel free to let us know!

Kamy Anderson

Kamy Anderson is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing on emerging technologies in the areas of corporate training and education. He is an expert in learning management system and elearning authoring tools - currently associated with ProProfs.

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