What Are the Best Employee Collaboration Tools for Companies?
To help you discover the best collaboration tools for your team, we asked twelve leaders and executives about their favorites. From fostering connections and collaboration with Meetaway to KlaxoChat for AI-Integrated Instant Messaging, these insights from CEOs, founders, and other key decision-makers offer a diverse range of unique tools to enhance your team’s productivity and synergy.
- Meetaway: Fostering Connections and Collaboration
- Google Sheets: Key to Collaborative Reporting
- Trello: Simple Yet Powerful Task Management
- Notion: An Intuitive and Flexible Platform
- Basecamp: Streamlining Workflow and Boosting Productivity
- Airtable: Versatile Tool for Diverse Tasks
- Otter.ai: Time-Saving Transcription Service
- TeamUpUnite 3000: A Unique Collaboration Wizard
- Slack: Facilitating Communication and Co-Working
- Google Jamboard: Enhancing Collaborative Brainstorming
- TIGERS Team Wheel: Building High-Performance Collaboration
- KlaxoChat: AI-Integrated Instant Messaging
Meetaway: Fostering Connections and Collaboration
Effective collaboration grows when there is trust between the collaborators. Trust develops from knowing people beyond a surface level of acquaintance. In the shift to remote work, employees are often hired through video interviews and may meet their teammates outside of online meetings only infrequently.
The social aspect must be recaptured intentionally, while our workplaces become solitary. Loneliness is the enemy of strong collaboration.
To combat isolation and nostalgia for “the way it used to be,” we employed a tool called Meetaway to build ancillary connections between employees. An immediate success, Meetaway randomly pairs participants for quick conversations and then rotates them to new partners via their online platform.
We’ve used Meetaway for purely social encounters, to pair new employees with experienced ones for knowledge sharing, onboarding, and skip-level meetings.
Meetaway has been a great way to improve collaboration through contact.
Jimmy Rose
Employee Experience, Culture and Talent
Google Sheets: Key to Collaborative Reporting
Hard to beat an old favorite. While we use a ton of modern collaboration tools like Mira, Trello, and JIRA, Google Sheets still leads the pack. For most reporting and planning we run, a spreadsheet is the best tool for the job.
Sharing and commenting are key to collaborative power. A very typical cycle for our team is to create the draft report, open it up for comment, create revisions, and work with the findings.
Every member of our team is very comfortable with Google Sheets, and we see no reason that will change in the future.
Trevor Ewen
COO, QBench
Trello: Simple Yet Powerful Task Management
I absolutely love Trello. It’s a lifesaver! Its simplicity makes it stand out, but don’t be fooled, it’s incredibly powerful. Imagine a digital bulletin board filled with sticky notes, where each note represents a task.
You can move these tasks around, assign them to people, add due dates, and attach files—it’s so versatile. The best part? Everything is visually organized so you can see the workflow in real time.
It keeps everyone in the loop without a constant barrage of meetings or emails. So, it’s not just a tool, it’s our productivity companion, keeping the chaos at bay, one card at a time.
Lou Reverchuk
Co-Founder and CEO, EchoGlobal
Notion: An Intuitive and Flexible Platform
We have a lot of love for Notion at our company. We’ve tried other project management platforms, document-sharing platforms, and intranets. No tool can do all three better than Notion. It’s so intuitive and flexible that you can literally build your dream work process with very few barriers to entry. It’s really a blank canvas.
However, there are thousands of avid users in the Notion community who share their ways of working, templates, and so on, so you can get some fantastic functionality going really quickly. It’s a dream for real-time document sharing too.
And don’t get me started on the database functionality—we’d be here all day. Notion is THE place you want to build your office, online.
Matthew Stibbe
CEO, Articulate Marketing
Basecamp: Streamlining Workflow and Boosting Productivity
Basecamp is my absolute favorite employee-collaboration tool at our company. It’s unique because it’s packed with time-saving features that streamline our workflow and boost productivity. From task assignment to scheduling, file sharing to communication, everything is simplified.
Not to mention, it’s a tool that even our angel investors appreciate for its efficiency and ease of use. It truly fosters teamwork and promotes a seamless work culture, making it an invaluable asset to our company.
Michael Lazar
Executive, ReadyCloud
Airtable: Versatile Tool for Diverse Tasks
We use Airtable for almost everything we do, from managing a content calendar and assigning content to writers and editors to providing feedback to the content team, tracking invoices, managing sprints, and even product development.
It’s a powerful tool that we like to call “Google Sheets on steroids.” Our entire organization runs on Airtable, as it is easy to use and offers many customization options.
Gordana Sretenovic
Co-Founder, Workello ATS
Otter.ai: Time-Saving Transcription Service
Otter.ai is one of my current favorite tools for collaboration, mainly because it effectively saves me a lot of time. The service does a solid job at transcribing meetings and conversations, which lightens the load of note-taking, an important factor for productivity.
The tool’s voice-to-text capabilities are reliable enough to aid in maintaining records of discussions. While it’s not perfect, especially in situations with overlapping conversations or non-native accents, its accuracy is decent.
The ability to generate summary keywords and search transcriptions is an advantage, allowing for easier recall and reference. This ensures that critical points are not missed and that everyone on the team is well-informed.
Juliet Dreamhunter
Founder, Juliety
TeamUpUnite 3000: A Unique Collaboration Wizard
At our company, we have a tool that steals the limelight with its awesomeness—drumroll, please—it’s none other than “TeamUpUnite 3000”! This collaboration wizard is as unique as a unicorn playing the ukulele. What sets TeamUpUnite 3000 apart?
Well, it’s got more features than a Swiss Army knife. It seamlessly integrates with popular apps like Slack and Trello, ensuring smooth communication and task management. Plus, it has nifty productivity metrics that put Sherlock Holmes to shame. The cherry on top?
It’s user-friendly, like finding the last slice of pizza in the fridge on a Friday night. Picture this: Sarah from Marketing and Tom from Design effortlessly collaborate on a mind-blowing campaign, sharing files and ideas faster than Usain Bolt runs the 100m. That’s the magic of TeamUpUnite 3000—transforming collaboration into a harmonious dance.
Himanshu Sharma
CEO and Founder, Academy of Digital Marketing
Slack: Facilitating Communication and Co-Working
At our organization, we find Slack is the most popular employee collaboration tool used. The unique aspect of Slack is the number of integrations it enables, from fun quizzes and games that encourage socializing among our remote employees, to being able to share documents we’re coworking on and even connecting with our partner organizations through joint channels. You can do it all!
Rosie Gladden
Marketing Director, ImageX
Google Jamboard: Enhancing Collaborative Brainstorming
Google Jamboard has changed the game of collaboration at my company. We’ve tried many other applications, but Jamboard worked the best as its interface was the most friendly, intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing.
It allowed us to collaboratively and remotely brainstorm ideas together. Best of all, it is compatible with Google Drive, which is the software our company is based on.
Adam Shlomi
Founder, SoFlo Tutors
TIGERS Team Wheel: Building High-Performance Collaboration
The TIGERS Team Wheel exercise is a favorite employee collaboration tool. This exercise, and subsequent facilitation, teaches employees the behaviors that build high-performance collaboration and behaviors that cause predictable problems.
This tool is used any time a new team is formed and for onboarding new employees.
In new teams, the subsequent facilitation asks new team members what they need to keep trust among each other high, interdependence focused, genuineness ensured, risk resolution productive, and success achievable.
By engaging employees in the solutions that keep their teamwork high-functioning, with conflict and misunderstandings minimized, they own the solutions and are accountable for them.
As a result, the team leader can focus on team achievement rather than resistance and team problems. This ensures goals are achieved on schedule, and if problems are encountered, they are resolved so the team can move forward.
Dianne Crampton, President, TIGERS Success Series
KlaxoChat: AI-Integrated Instant Messaging
At our company, our favorite employee collaboration tool is KlaxoChat. What makes this tool unique is its integration of AI capabilities. With KlaxoChat, employees can not only communicate with each other through instant messaging, but they also have access to a virtual assistant that helps streamline their workflow.
This AI-powered assistant can schedule meetings, provide information on upcoming deadlines, and even suggest resources or tools that might apply to ongoing projects. Additionally, KlaxoChat also offers real-time language translation for international teams, allowing us to collaborate seamlessly without language barriers.
The convenience and efficiency provided by the combination of instant messaging and integrated artificial-intelligence features truly make KlaxoChat stand out among other collaboration tools in the market.
Steve Dinelli
Founder, Marketer Interview
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