4 Tools to Help Optimize Your Company's Culture of Collaboration While every business has tremendous collaborative potential, it isn't always being tapped.
By Pratik Dholakiya Edited by Dan Bova
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Collaboration is the heartbeat of any successful organization. It wouldn't be a stretch to say your company's success depends on its culture of collaboration.
And while every business has tremendous collaborative potential, it isn't always being tapped. The use of the right tools can help cultivate these habits. Yes, that's right -- you can now pick from a variety of tools to help up your organization's collaborative ante.
Here are four of the best:
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1. GrexIt
This tool helps you stay on top of your emails, enabling you to assign emails as tasks to different team members and keep track of them with shared Gmail labels. The biggest benefit to shared labels is that they work from any email client, from Outlook to Thunderbird. Even if you are inundated with emails, GrexIt helps make them an integral part of your organization's collaborative efforts while ensuring you don't get too overwhelmed.
You can track the status of assigned emails, monitor email conversations, keep an eye on task updates, organize your Gmail inbox and convert emails into tasks that can be pursued to a logical and predefined conclusion.
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2. Trello
Trello is a tool that helps manage a project in stages, whereby team members must complete one stage before moving on to the next. You can divide your project into a list of tasks, which are listed on the Trello board in the form of cards. Team members must be given access to this board to kickstart the collaborative process.
Cards can be dragged and dropped between various lists by members of the team as the project progresses and tasks get completed. Team members can post comments on the cards and add checklists and due dates to ensure that everybody is aware of a project's status at any given time.
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3. Asana
If you are looking for a holistic collaboration suite, Asana is a good choice. It's one of the most complete collaboration tools available on the market. Asana gets rid of email dependency and can become a one-stop collaboration hub for your business.
Rather than sending your team emails about the work that needs to get done, you can create tasks accessed through Asana. You can even categorize these tasks and keep track of related conversations in shared projects folders.
One of the biggest benefits of this tool is that it integrates with other platforms, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Zapier, GitHub and more.
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4. Yammer
There is no doubt that, if used well, social networks can improve internal communication, but some enterprises have reservations about using social collaboration tools. That's where Yammer enters the picture. Yammer acts like your company's private social network, connecting coworkers with relevant information and project conversations.
This tool allows you to create a Yammer group consisting of people working on a specific project. You can share project files, feedback and a whole lot more in this group, enhancing communication among different members.
With the Yammer Inbox, you stay up to speed with the latest group updates and all private messages being sent your way.
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