No matter how brilliant and qualified the employees at your company are, if they can’t work together, if they can’t collaborate effectively, you are in for trouble. Unless you are a one man, or woman, show, team members must be able to lift each other up, motivate each other and inspire each other.
And, yes, sometimes they will even disagree. Having permission to disagree is important, otherwise everyone just follow the leader, and new innovations and ideas won’t be shared.
Inc Magazine has a post entitled “5 Tools to Help Your Team Collaborate Better Than Ever. While the article has five options to choose from, some of them have been around so long it’s likely you are already familiar with them. But I think two of them, while not brand-new ideas, are worth looking at again:
“Project Collaboration Tools
The earliest project management tools were essentially glorified calendars and spreadsheets, mainly used to track deadlines and responsibilities. Today’s project management tools still help manage deadlines and responsibilities, but do much more by integrating sophisticated collaboration features, including shared file storage, places for team members to leave comments and ask questions, as well as instant messaging, screen sharing and conferencing–all in one virtual workspace.
These improved tools can bring team members together no matter how spread out in the real world, so everyone knows what everyone else is doing with scheduling, communications, file management and coordination features in a single dashboard. Slack revolutionized this space by taking the friction out of project workflows, through collaboration features. Trello and Basecamp also place heavy emphasis on collaboration.
Visual Design Collaboration Tools
Are you still going through the time-consuming process of back and forth calling, traveling and lugging around blueprints and sketchbooks, or individually emailing mockups? Whether you are a developer designing a website or an app, or a photographer, architect, landscaper or interior designer, visual design collaboration tools have the power to transform how you work with clients.
One of the challenges creative professionals face is finding common ground with their clients and other team members during the iterative design process. Effortless collaboration and the ability to easily obtain feedback on visual work product is key. GoVisually, InVision, Mural,Concept Board, and Prevue are examples of today’s visual design collaboration tools.”
Whether you work within a Barter Network like I do, or you work remotely with other small businesses, or just within a corporate structure, being able to collaborate effectively with others is an important part of doing business.