Many businesses have multiple locations, with headquarters all across the world. With that level of growth comes the challenge of coordinating team efforts over distance. Thankfully, an assortment of tools available online today make it easy to erase those miles and communicate almost as if you were in the same room with your coworkers.
Cloud-based software allows everyone on your team to have real-time access to in-progress work. Plus, there’s no expensive IT maintenance required, so you can save money while also increasing productivity. Win-win for everyone.
Project Management
Having a solid project management platform is critical to the success of your team, whether you’re all working locally from the same office, or you’re spread out all over the globe. No matter your industry, there are lots of moving parts to coordinate. Project management software that integrates with your CRM keeps things simplified. Quickly and easily manage clients, projects, to-do lists and calendars from a central location – accessible from anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
Live Video Chat
Sometimes, business will call for live video chats with a small group of people. With tools like Google Hangouts, Blab, and Skype, there’s a way to host video conferences with small groups of people for free. Blab works great if you need multiple hosts with mostly viewers. Skype is popular, but not an ideal choice if you want to record the call for later viewing. If your team is all over the world, chances are you won’t find a time that works well for everyone to attend live, so you’ll want the option to view the chats later.
Editorial Calendar
When you’ve got a team of people working, it only makes sense to use an editorial calendar. CoSchedule offers a robust calendar that teams can work on together, ensuring everyone remains on the same page. As an added bonus, it features a WordPress plugin so you can keep your editorial calendar right inside your company blog. You can automatically schedule your posts to go out to Facebook and Twitter, too.
Social Media Management
While CoSchedule can help with social media management to a degree, it can be a hassle to load all of your other social content in the platform if you’re working from your WordPress blog. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow for multiple team members to access your social accounts, schedule posts, and more.
Buffer includes the ability to schedule Pinterest posts, a nice bonus for businesses that need to maintain an active presence on that network.
File Sharing
If you need to quickly and easily share files among coworkers, there are many options – Dropbox and Google Drive are simple and effective. OneDrive, Microsoft’s answer to their competition, is another good solution.
OneDrive is the better answer for small teams who also need cloud-based access to Microsoft Office, because an Office 365 subscription includes the ability to share with other users. Each user on the shared account gets their own 1 TB OneDrive space, plus 60 free Skype minutes a month.
No matter which of these platforms you choose to use, you can download them to your computer and mobile phone so files and folders can be shared directly from your hard drive or mobile device. And, if you have multiple team members who need access, you can control what is shared with whom in just a few clicks.
Screen Sharing
Skype is great if you want to share a screen with a small group, but when more than one person needs control, it’s not ideal. That’s where ScreenHero comes in. Share a single screen, but allow multiple people to work on the document together – each with their own cursor. With the voice chat feature, it’s like working in the same room together.
With the variety of cloud-based tools available today, there’s no reason your remote team can’t operate as a cohesive unit regardless of distance. When there’s something that needs to be done, you’ll be able to find the tool you need to accomplish it.
