An Elaboration on Collaboration

So many people are now working from home (WFH) 100% of the time. Hopefully if this is the case for you, you can maintain productivity and stay positive during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While a lot of us are used to living the entrepreneur life from a home office, it's still a big adjustment to have to self-isolate and stop all face-to-face interactions with coworkers and clients.

I encourage you to use this time to take a closer look at your overall business goals, focus on your health (both physical and mental) and self-care, and enjoy some family time at home.

I think many small business owners are having to pivot their marketing strategy, and what they do when the Coronavirus passes could look quite different from what they did before.

I wanted to share some useful tech tools that can make your day-to-day WFH life much easier.

Team Communication Tools
This is probably the biggest WFH product decision you'll have to make. Your team needs a reliable and easy-to-use tool that lets them instantly message coworkers. The right one for you depends on your business needs and challenges, team size and budget.

1. You may have heard of Slack. This tool gives you the ability to create channels around multiple topics and invite users. From marketing content ideas to social media tactics to office dog photos, your team can create relevant channels for easy chat and collaboration. It also integrates with many useful tools, including Outlook Calendar, Twitter, HubSpot and Salesforce, so you can see what's going on at all times right in the Slack app (no need to click in and out of your daily calendar or Twitter feed, for example). There are SO MANY fun and creative emojis you can use too, making remote messaging in a challenging time like this a little more lighthearted.
2. Another popular platform is Discord. Popular with gamers, this voice, video and text tool isn't just for talking to coworkers, but for finding like-minded communities and new friends. You can create "servers" and "channels" for specific topics, similarly like you do for Slack channels. While Slack has more business integrations, Discord has voice channels, so you can easily chat with team members. Discord also lets you set user roles and permissions.
3. Flock is a cloud-based team communication tool with video and audio calling, screen sharing, text chat, integration with other business applications and more. You can tag colleagues in comments and to-do lists, upload documents, images and videos and set reminders and due dates. Polls, code snippet sharing and group discussions are available, and it integrates with other apps such as Trello, Github, Google Drive and Asana.

Team Collaboration Tools
Your employees need to be able to share their work, whether they're creating on a marketing strategy or editing a press release. Here are a few that might fit your small business needs.

1. G Suite is a Google product that's made up of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products. In one suite of tools, it offers email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentation decks, shared calendars, cloud storage, and more.You can comment and make suggestions on specific documents through Google Sheets and Docs, edit documents online simultaneously and collaborate on projects and documents. It's easy to give users permission to specific files.
2. Evernote: This is more than a note-taking app. Evernote helps you capture, prioritise and share ideas, track projects and to-do lists. I find it super helpful for note-taking, obviously, but also as a sort of "digital filing cabinet" that simplifies organisation. There's a free, basic and business package; compare your options here.

CRM Tools
CRM stands for "customer relationship management," and CRM tools help you with things like inbound lead management, sales tracking, social tracking and eNewsletter delivery. Here are three to consider:

1. MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing platform with tools to create everything from emails to postcards. They have a great selection of templates to choose from that can then be further modified to suit your brand. Their intuitive interface and thorough reporting are great, but things can get expensive as your subscriber list or number of emails increase. You can compare their different plans here.
2. Constant Contact has always been a big rival with MailChimp to be the brand name in email marketing. It's a huge company and a great option if Facebook is a big part of your online marketing strategy. Constant Contact has an email option that is designed so users can easily share your newsletter on Facebook. This option can be considered the most social media-friendly and has all the major features of the others noted. If your online marketing involves Hootsuite (you can integrate this into Hootsuite) and you focus your efforts on gaining traction on social media then this is a great newsletter tool for you.
3. AWeber is an extremely popular option and recommended by many professional marketing companies. It gives you five plans to choose from and a long list of features such as unlimited email marketing campaigns, follow-ups, lists and Auto Responders. Many people believe their Auto Responder platform is superior to other companies, allowing businesses to automate the process of delivering personalised emails to customers on a schedule.

Project Management Tools
A collaborative task management tool lets everyone track and manage all of their projects. Think of it as an online scheduler, taskmaster, and collaboration tool to manage your team's workflows.

1. Asana is one of the leading tools and gets a lot of positive feedback. It allows everyone on your team to follow the whole workflow of a project in an easy visual tool. You'll always know where your team is at and who's responsible for what and when. From daily reminders on a task that's due, to the ability to easily add collaborators or assign teammates a sub-task of a project, Asana makes it simple to see what everyone's day, week and month looks like (but you can easily move things around if plans change).
2. Monday.com is a pretty simple, intuitive visual team management tool (it's really a project management platform). It runs processes, workflows, and projects in one digital workspace. Visually, it looks the same as a collection of very customised spreadsheets, in which every team member can log their tasks and update them with status reports and other relevant information.
3. That means that every person can see all active tasks and keep count on their progress. Team members can work on multiple projects without getting lost by using Monday's weekly overview. The workflow can be customised just about any way you want it to communicate priority, what's done, not done and so on. The colourful designs and big buttons don't hurt either!

Social Media Management Tools
Many small businesses will already have a social media management tool set up. A social media management tool allows you to manage all of your accounts from one dashboard, which saves you both time and frustration.

These tools share your content at the best possible times throughout the day, so your followers and fans see your updates more often. It's a smarter and more efficient way to schedule and share your social media posts.

The best part about these tools is the built-in analytics system, which will give you a glimpse into what's performing well, and when your social media posts are making the most impact.

Here are two social media management tools I personally use:

1. Buffer shows your scheduled posts and analytics (how in-depth those analytics get depends on the plan you choose). Many small business owners choose Buffer because of its sleek, clean interface that's easy for beginners to get the hang of.
2. I find that while Buffer is great for less demanding social media needs, Hootsuite is where it's at if you want to see your timelines, replies, and more across all your social networks. Both Buffer and Hootsuite offer free and paid plans, so you can always try them out and see which one feels like a better fit for your small business.

I hope I've given you an overview of some tools that will help boost your team's productivity and morale while you're all working from home. You may also benefit from our article on boosting business efficiency on our website.