Difficulties that might appear during remote collaboration. Why do digital tools play a crucial role in remote workspace?
Why is remote cooperation difficult?
Everyone is familiar with the misunderstanding that occurs when working remotely, whether you’re part of a team that works abroad, work from home, or are temporarily remote just due to certain circumstances. Misunderstandings also cause worry, which has a long-term impact on team morale, engagement, productivity, and creativity.
Because of all listed above, digital communication and cooperation are critical to the success of any remote workforce. And it is very important to find a solution that would make your team linked.
That is why choosing digital tools play an important role in organizing remote meetings. By bringing together remote teams, online meeting tools help companies save on travel costs and time. They make internal negotiations simple and fast. Desktop sharing and collaboration features further enhance team productivity.
Below, you will find several examples of the digital tools that can be considered by choosing the best platform for your company’s collaboration.
Digital whiteboards
Over the last several years, there has been a rising demand for using digital whiteboards among remotely conducted workshops. Each of them has a different level of effectiveness, but that doesn’t reduce their popularity among users. Depending on the problems you want to solve, you can decide yourself whether to use this kind of technology or not.
Furthermore, technological difficulties are very uncommon when it comes to analog gear.
Platforms for internal crowdsourcing and ideation
Internal crowdsourcing tools may help you to collect unique ideas from individuals all around your organization. Once you’ve prioritized the topics, just distribute the submission link and encourage others to submit ideas. In order to achieve the best outcomes, everyone must be involved, not only those who originally are highly motivated.
You must also define the boundaries, as well as provide supporting documentation and basic rules for teams. Also, be extremely explicit about what will happen to the ideas that are submitted — give detailed information to your colleagues about the program’s aims, design, potential financing alternatives, executive sponsorship and others.
Remember that concepts presented through ideation platforms are often incremental innovations. Hands-on coaching – in-person or remotely with a good facilitator – is required to enable really diverse thinking and non-obvious ideas.
Validation and prototyping
Are you ready to construct a prototype to validate your solution with end users?
In this case you are granted with a variety of tools. The decision of choosing such a tool is frequently influenced by the amount of accuracy required to (in)validate your important assumptions with consumers.
Online communication
This is probably the most obvious way to make remote workshops. The platform usually presents free closed source software for private data exchange between two or more computers on the Internet. Most of the tools in this category enable you to send text messages, make video calls, organize video conferences, share a screen, exchange files and carry out voice communication. How to choose one? The answer is to find balance between features and cost.
File sharing
There are a great variety of file-sharing systems that can be used depending on the sync speed, file versioning backups, and the ability to share files easily through secure links.
Usually file sharing tools present a service that transfers files to the server that are stored in the “cloud”. Thus, it is possible to store certain data in a remote location and protect it from loss in the event of a failure on the PC.
Conclusion
To summarize, employees who work in remote teams might experience communication issues on a regular basis. As more of our interactions take place online, we will encounter new types of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. The answer is to find the digital tool that will help not only to make remote collaboration easy, but even to enhance it with its features and technical possibilities.