Having a remote team is bliss. You can hire people from any location without pressure on them to relocate or travel long hours. International talent recruitment is possible, and you don’t need to invest a whopping amount on office infrastructure.
With all these comes the herculean task of smoothly managing projects with remote teams. 16% of the surveyed people mentioned collaboration and communication as the biggest hurdle while working remotely. Project management becomes a road of thrones in such cases.
But cloud-based project management tools make tasks organization for remote teams much more manageable. Let’s see how:
How Online Collaboration and Tools Help Remote Teams?
1. Tracking Tasks
With project management tools for remote teams, you can assign tasks to each team member. Setting up deadlines, milestones, and reviewers of the tasks is easy. You don’t need to remind your team about the timelines. Such tools can automatically send reminders, show progress, and track the completion.
You can check the impediments for each task and help the team member to resolve them. With the history available for various tasks and members, you can conduct easy weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews.
2. Instant Messaging and Online Calls
Most online project management tools integrate with the communicator you use in your company. Sometimes, they have their own messaging system. Emails may not be effective for every piece of information you want to propagate to the team. Instant messengers come in handy when you want to broadcast a message or send a text to a team member.
Sometimes, you need to discuss issues or tasks on call. But spending bucks on personal calls is a burden. Most project management tools offer online calling facilities or integrate with tools that leverage video calls.
3. Screen Sharing
Solving an issue with brainstorming could be a challenge if your team is not sitting together. But screen sharing options of project management tools take this challenge head-on and relieve you from worries of quality and mistakes.
If you want to review your team’s work, you don’t need to swap numerous emails. All you need is to ask them to share the screen, review the job, and provide feedback. Screen recording or call’s video recording of such brainstorming sessions can help resolve recurring issues.
4. Documentation
Cloud-based collaboration tools also come with storage repositories for document management. Excel sheets, Word documents, images, PDFs, and many similar project-related documents.
A secure central repository on the web also helps to maintain version controlling of the documents. Reviewing and approval processes also come easy and fast with such setups.
Why Use Online Collaboration Tools for Project Management?
Online collaboration and project management tools are probably why more than 95% of people wish to work remotely. Let’s see some real benefits of these tools.
1. Cost-Effective
Online collaboration tools don’t demand you to maintain servers, UPS, server rooms, and the IT team. All you need is to run your project management from the tool. You are responsible for your data and communication with the team, and that’s all.
If you have a globally distributed team—like most remote teams these days—you don’t need to invest millions in the infrastructure at every location.
2. Reliable
Cloud-based tools have maintenance teams working in the background. They take care of crashes and data loss with timely backup and recovery. So, your data is in safe hands that maintain data integrity.
Since your data and documents are in the cloud, your team members don’t lose them in case of device theft, damage, or loss. All you need from them is to log in to the tool with their credentials from another device.
3. Secure
These online tools are made available to the public for use only after they pass several rigorous security tests. They follow HTTPS protocol and come with SSL certificates for data security.
These tools also follow your country or regional guidelines of data sharing and security. Thus, even if you have global teams, you don’t need to worry about GDPR or any similar regulations.
4. Easy Access
Online collaboration tools don’t need to be installed on your laptop or desktop. They don’t demand you to know the technical know-how of using them, either. They are web-based, and hence, you just need an internet connection, a device—mobile, tablet, or laptop—and your credentials.
Such tools spare you from server issues, maintenance hassles, installation glitches, version updates, and training needs.
Conclusion
The world doesn’t seem to return to the office anytime soon. In fact, many organizations are planning to work in hybrid mode with distributed teams working from home or office at their convenience.
So, online project management tools are going to get more exposure and popularity than they ever had. Are you ready to make your work easy with such tools?
Welance is the all in one freelance business management platform used by freelancers across the globe. With the robust project management feature, you can now manage more by doing less. Sign up on Welance today.