The growing acceptance of virtual teams is picking pace among many small businesses as they look to increase productivity without restricting workers in the walls of their respective organizations.
According to Globalworkplaceanalytics, regular telecommuting increased by 79.7 percent between 2005 and 2015, and the stat doesn’t even include individuals working from home and those who are self-employed.
The perspective is that distributed teams give small companies flexibility in the makeup of their workforce, as well as offer cost savings over relying on full-time employees (you can reduce overhead costs such as equipment and office space).
In truth, there are several benefits of working as a distributed team, but there are also some challenges that can hinder the productivity of remote workers. Most of these challenges revolve around team collaboration and communication.
In a regular setting, all the staff is present in the office, where the best decisions and insights come from cafeteria discussions, face to face team meetings, and meeting new people. Working as a distributed team does make it difficult to create a company culture and collaborate effectively.
That said, these challenges can be minimized with a bit of technology. The following are some of the tools that can boost the productivity of your distributed team, make collaboration simple and keep them a part of the company culture:
Buffer
Buffer lets your staff schedule social media posts regardless of their location. This is a great tool if your company has a lot of content it wants to post, but from different employees at different times. Since being a distributed team often means a variable schedule, your team can plan social media updates in advance so they always go out at the right time.
StartMeeting
This tool lets you enhance conference calls through screen sharing, which include seating capacity of 50-1000, integrated audio, and recording. Meetings with remote workers can be recorded & shared via email and social networks. StartMeeting’s audio conferencing feature includes an integrated set of professional meeting tools where participants simply click the meeting link or dial-in to join.
Asana
Asana lets you post projects and details about them. Remote workers can then mark the project as complete when they fulfill its tasks. Apart from organizing tasks, Asana lets you assign task responsibilities and maintain projects in a single place. It reduces the need of email communication while working on tasks as distributed team. Asana is free to use for up to 15 members.
Hipchat
This is a 24/7 active chat room where you and your distributed team can hang out together each day – organizing and planning via one-to-one chat and team-specific virtual rooms. The tool can be synced with a hubot that will notify you of all the automated things, such as new comments on social profiles and new blog post updates. While some of the HipChat features are similar to Skype, the tool is geared towards the business community.
HelpScout
When you have a lot of individuals working on support tickets, it can get messy without organization. HelpScout lets you collaborate with your workforce on support tickets. You can assign to a team member, add notes, and automate specific actions. Actionable reports show you how your support responses perform. HelpScout is free to use for up to 3 members.