The right system can bridge the gaps that remain after switching your team’s work experience from completely in-office to one that’s hybrid or fully remote. This allows your team to mimic the daily flow of a physical office through video conferencing, real-time document editing, screen sharing and file storage. Here’s a scattering of collaboration tools that easily integrate with larger platforms. Exploring this array of tools and just what each of them brings to the table can help you navigate the blizzard of possibilities. Some of them serve as project management tools, others offer the latest iterations of video conferencing and some are comprehensive file management programs. But most are a hybrid of all of the above — a one-stop shop. Basecamp: Developed by the authors of the book “Remote: Office Not Required” who designed the project management app so that you can “know where everything is, what everyone is working on and exactly where to put the next thing everyone needs to know about.” Organizations using Basecamp include Shopify, NASA, Quartz, 3M, University of Miami. Bluescape: Emerging from the entertainment industry and now widely used outside that sector. CEO Peter Jackson says Bluescape solves the problems of “tossing around files, PDFs and videos that are all on different pages . . . in meetings with one person talking, a lot of people listening, sharing a document that one person created… We’re letting everybody work at the same time on a proj- ect-by-project basis.” A virtual whiteboard emphasizes visual content with built-in voice and video meetings. Bluescape offers video conferencing, project management, file management and file storage all in one. Among its users are the U.S. government, Netflix, J.P. Morgan and Dell. Crowdcast.io: The conferencing platform, often presented as a real contender for the Zoom role, facilitates webinars, live courses, online conferences, summits and even festivals that allow group members to join on any device via popular social media sites and are broadcast via YouTube, Twitch and Facebook Live. It focuses on live engagement with attendees via live chat, polls, time-stamped Q&As and face- to-face. A standout feature: advanced data and analytics of the event and its audience. Users include Adobe Creative Jam, IBM Developer and hundreds of startups. LifeSize: The first productivity/presentation app to offer 4K capabilities for both 4K video streams and full-motion 4K content. It offers a technological leap to organizations that regularly conduct business meetings via videoconferencing, taking not only client video
presentations but also intra-office meetings to a never before seen experience in quality and variation that can serve as a model for future software developers. Among its users: Yale University, Shell Energy and NASA. Milanote: Targeted toward creative groups, this project management software uses multi-purpose visual boards to represent each stage of each project, with drag-and-drop functions to collect images, text, files, links and more from anywhere on the web — and, through the mobile app, from smartphone to computer — to add to productivity boards. It also stores files for continuous projects and future reference. Users include Netflix, Nike, Adobe and Dropbox. Monday.com: This project and file management tool’s strength is its compatibility with leading collaboration software systems. It lets organizations aggregate data with more than 40 integrations including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, GMail and Excel, with features including automations, time-tracking, document sharing and real-time collaboration. Users include the NHL, Coca-Cola, Universal, Hulu and EA Sports. Slack: (an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conver- sation and Knowledge”) was introduced nearly a decade ago and has since become an indispensable real-time message board that in many organizations has replaced emails. This year, its number of users reached 12 million, including more than half of the Fortune 500 companies.
What’s missing in remote work
Today, most workers see the physical office space as a social amenity, not a mandatory way of working, Reisinger and Fetter found in their study. It’s the camaraderie, the walls and hallways, and even the casual banter that goes on in packed meeting rooms that employees miss. Now, those social experiences can be effectively mimicked, even with teams spread across the globe. To recreate those vital social connections, dozens of virtual tools have popped up with the sole purpose of allowing virtual colleagues to interact, share their interests and find common ground. Tied to large platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, these apps offer casual chats — in virtual break rooms and coffee dates — among individuals or small groups of employees, often selected randomly in a “chat-roulette” style. They focus not on work, but on building deeper personal connections and a sense of belonging in the remote workplace.
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