Whether established businesses providing telecommuting perks or online startup organizations, the number of remote workers has significantly increased for the past number of years. Statistics from Owl Labs show that before the epidemic, 52% of workers worldwide worked remotely at least once per week and 68% worked remotely at least once every month.
Whether it’s e-commerce, service agencies (website developers, SEO and marketing agencies, writing and translating teams, etc., or any other type of business that fits online, new online-based businesses are constantly launching while these figures mostly reflect traditional brick and mortar companies.
Running an internet company with a virtual crew poses challenges, but they are readily addressed. There are countless solutions available to streamline productivity, keep the whole team in contact, and ensure everyone keeps on target. We will discuss in this post some of the most crucial instruments and strategies virtual teams could apply to ensure the ship runs without problems.
The following is a selection of some of the best virtual team collaboration tools.
File Sharing Made Possible by Cloud Computing
Sending attachments by email just doesn’t cut it if your team must exchange a lot of files back and forth. One can find burdens in even direct messaging files. A virtual team must have appropriate cloud storage capacity for well arranged files and folders.
Along with other crucial corporate data, internal documentation, HR policies, and training programs must be kept in a trustworthy location.
For instance, Dropbox is among the most often used cloud storage options available to online businesses since it provides strong security encryption including 256-bit AES. Strong encryption can not, however, stop human errors—the main drivers of data leaks. Here, it is a good habit to provide staff members with training materials. Regarding safeguarding private firm data, online cybersecurity courses can impart the best security methods.
For virtual teams, Google Drive provides several practical basic storage choices; but, if your team requires something more sophisticated, take into account one of the premium cloud storage solutions. Highly suggested are cloud storage providers Egnyte, Dropbox, and Zoho.
Track of Time Instruments
Time monitoring solutions like Controlio are quite helpful to work hours tracking for virtual teams members paid based on time or for those simply curious about team member time spent on specific activities. They can be basic clock in/clock out timers or they can offer frequent screen grabs of the worker’s screen—very helpful if a specific team member finds Facebook to be highly distracting.
Correct Software for Communication
Real-time communication is a demand of a virtual team, hence business email is not enough. Mostly for commercial correspondence—that is, for leads generation or client follow-up—email should be employed. Real-time chat tools are quite important for remote teams.
Smaller teams can get away with forming groups via instant messengers, including Facebook or WhatsApp. However, when the virtual team grows and additional roles are generated, you could need something that lets each department build separate rooms, better filter private and public conversations, pinning of significant documents to various rooms, etc. Many virtual teams take advantage of chat apps such as Slack, Rocket Chat, or even Google Hangouts.
Moreover, virtual conferences, presentations, and team meetings could be hosted quite effectively using video conference tools such as GoToWebinar. On its $399/mo Enterprise subscription, GoToWebinar can host up to 3,000 attendees; Zoom charges $9,900 yearly for the same number of participants.
Webinar guests may view the conference via web browser without downloading the desktop application unlike with Zoom. When you just need to webcast several business speakers—for example, and not arrange an interactive video team conference—this is rather helpful.
That is not to argue Zoom lacks uses. Although GoToWebinar is maybe better for webcast presentations and Zoom is more appropriate for interactive meetings, both programs are somewhat comparable. Additional excellent virtual team video tools are Google Meetings, Cisco WebEx, BlueJeans, and Skype for Business. For all kinds and sizes of online virtual teams, there is thus generally a video conferencing option.
Task Management Applications
Virtual teams have one drawback in that it might be simple for individual employees to get distracted. Just “quickly checking” Facebook messages could cause one to peruse the newsfeed, search Reddit, and view YouTube videos. Actually, a virtual team must contend with a lot of virtual distractions.
This makes it rather helpful to set up task management systems whereby team members may be allocated assignments and their progress monitored. Though they can be more sophisticated than that, consider these as virtual sticky notes. Though that’s hardly a complete list, Wunderlist, Trello, Jira, Todoist, Wrike, and Asana are among the most often used task management tools.
Better still, many of the task management apps can be combined with your email or chat program, Slack, using your communication tools. If a client requests something, for instance, you can instantly add that email to a to-do list and assign it to the relevant worker as well as automatically let them know via Slack chat that a to-do item has been generated for them.
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