Team collaboration is key to a successful business. Whether your employee wants to get a fresh perspective on their project or a designer wants to work on a marketing campaign, team collaboration helps you come up with innovative solutions and ideas to approach problems in new ways. Finding the right set of team collaboration tools enables you to unlock effective cooperation and ensure your employees’ talents can shine.
Collaboration within your company allows you to be more transparent, giving employees their due credit. Teams that have embraced collaboration within their culture have seen increases in worker morale and happiness, decreased employee turnover, improved execution of ideas, and even increased revenue.
Companies like MailChimp have an open collaboration culture where employees develop side projects. By being flexible and encouraging employees to work with each other, MailChimp has made its employees self-driven and be more accountable for their product’s success.
While we are seeing more teams embrace this culture, many companies still struggle to prioritize team collaboration. And the negative impacts of this are obvious.
According to Salesforce, 86% of employees and executives cite a lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures.
If you don’t already encourage a culture of collaboration within your company, it’s time you did. To help you foster a collaborative environment, we’ve listed down 12 team collaboration tools for a workspace with a growth mindset.
Top 12 Team Collaboration Tools in 2023 For a Productive Team
1. Slack – Work communication
If you haven’t heard of Slack, you’re either a one-man-army or living under a rock. Traditionally, teams use a messaging platform for conversations, while file sharing is done on their email platform. Switching between two or three apps gets tedious, and this is where Slack excels.
With Slack every work-related conversation is managed in one space, which is why businesses of every size trust Slack to collaborate effectively. Slack lets you create specific channels that you can use for communication tied to projects, sprints, teams, or departments. The highly-customizable tool also integrates with most top applications.
Want to find a file your co-worker shared a few months back? Slack lets you search for messages and files by keywords. Slack is your one-stop solution for work communication. Foster team collaboration through utilizing this smart tool.
2. Trello – Project management
Managing a large project with a team of 4 or more members is no small feat. Project management is a skill, and a project management tool like Trello makes project planning, tracking, and collaboration seamless. With its kanban style dashboard, Trello lets project managers plan different moving pieces of a project, assign these smaller tasks, monitor their progress, and set deadlines.
If you’re looking to hone your project management skills while increasing team collaboration, Trello is a top-rated tool for project collaboration. Team members can view their current and upcoming tasks, as well as remain up-to-date on what their peers are working on. Start conversations within the task card on Trello and mark its status to ensure everyone on the project is aware of the work.
3. Loom – Screen recording
Employees often stumble on new work processes or software that can help their team work better. Encourage them to share these new ideas company-wide by suggesting screen recording apps.
Loom is a great screen recording app for employees to give tutorials and demos of tactics and apps they want to talk about. The app takes the boring documentation out of introducing a new strategy at work. Just capture what you’re doing, switching cameras when necessary, and share the video. The app also integrates with Slack, making team sharing even easier.
Developers can explain how to review code, sales teams can document the process of closing deals, design teams can collaborate and showcase their work, customer support can create product demos for users, and management can introduce new ideas to the team.
4. Typeform – Data collection
When there are multiple hands on one project, you need a systematic process to manage different ideas and opinions. For instance, if you have a project you are developing, the 5 people on the team will have 5 to 10 different kinds of sub-ideas for the project.
Your best bet is to have a well-oiled data collection system that can gather all the different ideas to be reviewed together. Data collection isn’t just important in project management for direct team collaboration. HRs can use data collection tools for more informal collaboration projects, like employee feedback, Secret Santa, or team activity planning.
Typeform is a minimal and straightforward data collection tool, quick to set up for the moderator and easy for team members to input data. Data is an important part of team collaboration and Typeform shows that it doesn’t have to be complicated. The use cases for Typeform go beyond project management and HR planning – it can even be used by the sales team to record their work progress on a monthly basis.
5. Notion – Team notes
Most of us store our notes in multiple places— Evernote, OneNote, a self-made group on WhatsApp, the default notes app on our phones. But the tricky part is sharing these notes with co-workers. You can’t send it on your work communication tool; the text is just too big.
Notion is your all-in-one solution for this. Whether you have a small text you want to remember later or document your marketing strategy, Notion lets you do all this and more.
Set up workspaces on Notion for department-wide documents, create private drafts for any notes you want to keep to yourself, and star important documents for later reference.
Notion also lets you keep the planning out of your Google Drive. Use this smart software to create team wikis and plan projects. This is one new team collaboration tool you need to adopt within your workplace.
6. OfficeAmp – FAQ library for the office
Imagine going over the same questions about your office or your file management system with every new hire. This isn’t a scalable solution as your business grows. To foster team collaboration within your workplace you need to remove dependencies so employees can ask the more important questions. This starts with an internal helpdesk that employees can refer to quickly.
OfficeAmp lets you create an FAQ library that you can build. Store password details, app preferences, number of leave days available, stationery questions, etc. This helpdesk can be effectively used when onboarding new hires so they don’t have to reach out to you for smaller details.
What’s more, this smart app lives in Slack, which means employees don’t have to visit third-party browsers to get answers. For any questions or issues that aren’t resolved, OfficeAmp lets employees raise a ticket that you can assign to respective managers and monitor easily.
7. Zoom – Video conferences
Do you have trouble finding the right video conferencing tool? We’ve been there. If the video conference app doesn’t have sound issues or video clarity, it has mandatory download requirements or doesn’t support mobile. A bad video conferencing tool hinders efficient team collaboration.
Host smooth video conferences with Zoom, an app built to solve your usual problems with virtual meetings. Besides useful features like screen sharing and high-quality video, Zoom also allows you to plug into the conversation with your web browser, its app, or even on mobile. You can also use Zoom to host webinars and tutorials. This team collaboration tool is especially helpful to remote working teams.
8. Asana – Sprint planning
While Asana is similar to Trello, each has unique upsides. If you’re looking for a team collaboration tool that helps you set up sprints within your company, we’d recommend Asana.
Asana allows you to set up deadlines, tag tasks, and view the sprint items with ease. You can choose to set up your sprint within a board or as a list.
Planning sprints gets easier as you have the option of duplicating the properties, and with Asana’s Workload page you can monitor productivity trends in real-time, helping employees manage their workload more effectively.
9. Figma – Design and Prototyping
One problem that many design teams have with traditional design software is the lack of prototyping. This is especially important if you’re designing your product feature or giving your website a new look.
You should be able to prototype your designs to allow your team to provide valuable feedback. If your design team is looking for a collaboration-friendly design tool, Figma is the answer.
Figma allows you to prototype your designs to give better context and stakeholders can easily comment on different parts of the design, making it easy for designers to make changes. The software makes real-time team collaboration easier, avoiding dependencies. Figma is also great for developers since the software makes it easy to pull design dimensions, styles, and images.
10. Dashlane – Password management
Password management is time-consuming. Teams often have too many shared accounts and manually setting up a unique, secure password for each of these accounts is not efficient. Unfortunately, relying on your web browsers is usually a poor solution since they have lax security.
Password management tools like Dashlane are a team’s best friend. This software generates highly secure passwords for different accounts you have online and stores them. You can create groups within Dashlane and choose to share passwords with individuals or with groups, based on your needs and requirements.
11. AttendanceBot
And now one of the most important tools to work more efficiently as a team – AttendanceBot. This multipurpose tool helps employees track time for timesheets, manage, approve, and communicate leave and absence, and schedule shifts or wfo and wfh days accordingly. And every functionality happens inside your existing team collaboration platform – Slack or Microsoft Teams.
With simple messages, AttendanceBot automates request routing, notifications, and announcements so the right people get the right info at the right time. It simplifies everything from lengthy approval processes and transparent time off, to timesheet generation and avoidin endless excel sheet tracking. You can focus on what matters the most in 2023 – better coordination, more collaboration, and great work!
PS Project tracking is an absolute must if you’re trying to keep your team on track with weekly sprints.
12. Xtensio
Xtensio is a strategy and communications platform where anyone can easily create, manage, share, and present professional business collateral. Teams collaborate on documents, presentations, proposals, reports, sales sheets, and other strategic exercises in real-time. Start with a template or create your own.
The editor works like a web builder so it’s easy to add images, videos, tables, and other interactive modules. Drag and drop, resize, change backgrounds, and specify colors and fonts to match your brand.
The best part is that the deliverables created on Xtensio are living documents (folios). Share the public link with colleagues and clients so everyone is always up-to-date, without the email attachments. Present a digital slideshow or export a PDF/PNG. All your work is organized on a private, branded team dashboard so you can keep the work flowing from anywhere.
That’s the top 12! We hope these team collaboration tools help facilitate ownership and encourage collaboration whether you’re remote, hybrid, or in the office. Help that growth mindset flourish.
Think there should be another tool on this list? Drop us a message or a comment below and we’ll make sure to check it out!
