10 Best Practices For Leading High-Performing Remote Teams

With Hubstaff, we can easily track the time our employees spend on various tasks and projects. It provides accurate and detailed insights into the time spent on specific activities, allowing us to monitor individual and team productivity levels. This helps identify potential bottlenecks or areas where improvements can be made.”– Veniamin Simonov, Head of Channel Marketing at NAKIVO Backup & Replication. The flexibility and customization options make it easy to adapt to any workflow, whether you’re managing simple to-do lists or complex projects with multiple dependencies.

thought on “10 Must-Have Collaboration Tools for Remote Teams in 2025”

Basecamp is more than a project management platform — it’s a catalyst for small teams to reach new heights. Designed with your success in mind, Basecamp empowers you to work smarter, manage projects efficiently, and enjoy the journey of collaborative work. Are you tired of juggling multiple remote working tools and losing track of important conversations? Slack could be your all-in-one platform to streamline teamwork, enhance productivity, and simplify work communication. Whether spearheading a small team project or overseeing a vast, remote workforce, these tools are your go-to resources for staying at the forefront of your productivity game.

Slack lets you create, share, keep track of and provide feedback on Lucidspark boards. The best remote work collaboration solutions help you choose appropriate meeting times and work asynchronously with teammates in different time zones. For example, Google Calendar shows potential meeting times that fall within all participants’ working hours, and Slack lets you set time zone preferences. Say you’re on an international team with members in both San Francisco and London.

Automatic meeting summaries capture key decisions without manual note-taking. Sentiment analysis tools help managers identify team morale issues early. Shared inboxes ensure no customer inquiry or internal message gets lost when team members work different schedules or time zones. For someone transitioning from working on-site to a remote or hybrid position, it’s more than a simple location change. It’s a different mode of collaboration that requires patience, intentional communication, and an understanding of other teammates’ work styles. Ineffective meetings can negatively affect morale and productivity, especially in a remote environment.

With Visme’s content calendar, you can manage all your design tasks in one place. The tool lets you create a visual roadmap for your marketing campaigns and projects. You can organize tasks by dates and milestones, assign them to team members and track their progress. Integrate Visme with most of the collaboration tools you already use to get a holistic view of your customers, data and organizational health.

Ways Visme Promotes Amazing Remote Collaboration in Teams

Recognizing and rewarding achievements boost morale, while virtual celebrations and team-building activities help combat isolation and create a sense of community. Begin by identifying your main challenges, involve your team in the process, and take advantage of free trials or plans to test usability. Carefully review pricing models and limitations, and prioritize ease of use along with powerful features.

Managers can easily check in with employees throughout the day and address any roadblocks immediately. This can be helpful for tasks requiring close collaboration or real-time problem-solving. Anthony Powell’s passion for psychology can be traced back to studying at San Diego State University, where he spent significant time working on studying behavior therapy. Now working as an in-house psychologist, he is especially passionate about helping individuals and teams in overcoming the challenges of the digital era.

What’s the difference between collaboration tools and communication tools?

  • Schedule frequent 1-on-1s with your team and skip-level meetings with their directs.
  • “I appreciate Slack for allowing teams to create dedicated spaces for different projects or topics, making discussions more focused and manageable.
  • Don’t assume that the social norms we take for granted in the real world will carry over to virtual collaboration.
  • Remote collaboration refers to the process of individuals working together on a project or task from different locations.

Whether you run an in-office, remote, or hybrid organization, they empower you to work better with employees, freelancers, agencies, and partners. At DigitalOcean, we provide the cloud infrastructure needed to make these collaborative tools work at scale, and we even use them to work together with our own teams. You can have a one-hour video meeting on the free plan, which is 20 minutes longer than Zoom. However, it’s the paid plans that catapult Google Meet to the top of the charts.

Slack : best for team chat

Confluence, another tool by remote team collaboration Atlassian, is a great wiki and whiteboard-style platform for team communication. Think of it like a brain-map app tool focusing on business needs and collaboration. Remote employees can create wiki pages, planning boards, and structured notes—all great for brainstorming and thorough documentation. It has an excellent user-friendly interface your team can use to easily plan projects and collaborate.

  • However, I have also found it very useful to have short, unplanned check-ins with team members when I notice something off during an online meeting.
  • Consider implementing regular check-ins at the individual and team levels to ensure everyone is aligned and informed.
  • Rippling’s workforce management platform is more than a communication tool; it’s a unified platform that helps businesses manage employees and operations across departments.

So, you’re ready to pick the best collaboration tool for your remote team. But with so many options out there, it can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. You might send a monthly (or quarterly) newsletter to your department or the company highlighting your team’s success (and spotlighting individual teammates). You may also look for opportunities for your direct reports to present in important meetings to give them valuable face-time with the rest of the company. Some teams find time once a week (or every other week) to play remote-friendly games like Among Us for Jack in the Box games.

It’s about moving away from traditional command-and-control approaches to more empathetic, inclusive, and flexible management styles. In remote team settings, traditional management styles often fall short. The absence of face-to-face interactions and the physical distance between team members can lead to a disconnect if not managed properly. Leaders must learn to read body language through video calls, interpret tone in written communication, and maintain employee engagement without the benefit of a physical office setting. This is why it’s important to find reliable ways for remote teams to communicate just as effectively as if they were in the office exchanging ideas face-to-face.

It lets team workers collaborate on projects, share updates, and exchange ideas. Slack started with simple messaging and has expanded to include channels, group conversations, video calls, and more. Another aspect of investing in the right tools is keeping up with technological advancements.

It’s about creating an ongoing dialogue where feedback, both positive and constructive, is welcomed and acted upon. It’s about recognizing the contributions of each team member and providing equal opportunities for growth and development. This not only boosts morale but also encourages a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. In the diverse and often dispersed world of remote work, practicing inclusive leadership is not just a moral imperative but a strategic necessity. Inclusive leadership is about embracing and leveraging the diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences that each team member brings to the table.

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