6 virtual collaboration solutions for remote teams

So many employers don’t yet see that modern employee experiences demand autonomy and flexibility more than they need presence. It’s no surprise that since the pandemic struck, technologists have been busily attempting to build collaborative tools to support the distributed hybrid future of work.

Here’s a look at some of the virtual collaboration tools available to companies.

Why these tools are important

Every survey suggests workers are more willing to find a new job than return to the bad old days of presence-based micro-management. Arguments that returning to the workplace boost collaboration may have some weight, but  much of this relies on old-fashioned email and virtual meetings held from the office, rather than the home.

Even at Apple, around 76% of employees aren’t happy at being frog-marched back to work. A recent Future Forum survey found that employee experience scores have declined across the board as workers are made to go back.

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

What makes the return harder to swallow is that so many managers haven’t even begun to use readily available project or task management tools to help them optimize team management in this remote-working era. A recent survey found almost 60% of project management pros now rely on meetings as a primary means of collaboration. But do those meetings need to be real, or virtual? And to what extent can emerging families of remote collaboration and productivity solutions help make managers feel better about their hard-working remote employees?