The business world is becoming increasingly global. Teams are crossing time zones; people are working remotely, and entire organizations are consolidating. But, regardless of if employees are working across departments, offices or countries, one thing remains the same: they need to be able to collaborate effectively.
Not only does collaboration affect productivity, it also impacts how engaged employees are with the company. In fact, in an employee engagement study from Wrike, 40% of respondents stated that one of the top reasons they remained engaged was that they collaborated well.
With this in mind, 2020 needs to be the year of optimizing collaboration. The key to this will be ensuring you have the right tools and processes in place to keep communication channels open and projects running smoothly.
To get you started, here are 5 project management tools to help you drive collaboration in 2021:
Keeping Track of Your Projects: Wrike
Arguably one of the most important steps to improving collaboration is improving team visibility into projects and tasks. To do this well, everything needs to be centralized in a single location.
Wrike is one of the best full-stack project management solutions to help with this, offering a wide breadth of features to keep your projects running at maximum efficiency. In addition to project managers, they offer solutions tailored to marketing, creative, product development and business operations teams, making it a perfect solution for enterprise organizations.
Managing Your Digital Content: MediaValet
Equally as important as centralizing tasks is centralizing your digital assets – the photos, videos and other files you use throughout a project. When your teams are able to continually access the same set of assets, they can more easily build cohesive, on-brand campaigns.
MediaValet is a leader in digital asset management (DAM) that does exactly that. It helps teams to organize, manage and distribute their content with a cloud-based library. While DAMs are usually optimized for final assets, MediaValet offers the unique ability to also effectively manage work-in-progress files, making it an ideal solution across operations, creative and marketing departments.
Bridging Your Systems: Unito
Another major break in communication happens when working across departments, as each team rarely uses the same project management system. When Marketing uses Wrike, Customer Success uses ZenDesk and Development uses Jira, it can be near impossible for you to keep track of every project.
Unito provides a solution to this problem. With two-way integrations between top project management tools, you can build your ideal workflow and improve collaboration across your teams. The customizability and depth of Unito's syncs, easy setup, and multi-tier pricing structure make Unito a strong tool for both SMBs and enterprises.
Communicating Consistently: Slack
When working on any project, the communication rarely stops after the initial brief. There are questions, clarifications and conversations that happen along the way. When this happens over email, there can be major delays if emails are missed or not followed-up on.
As a corporate instant messaging platform, Slack enables teams to communicate with each other consistently more effectively. Users can message individuals directly or create channels for specific projects to ask questions and stay up to date on any given task. With solutions for nearly every department, Slack is often implemented company-wide, so it can be a great solution for organizations that have lots of cross-departmental collaboration.
Connecting Face-to-Face: Zoom
Even with email, Slack and other communication tools in place, sometimes the best way to collaborate is face-to-face. But, when your team works remotely or across offices, this can be an impossible task.
Zoom is a video and web conferencing solution that enables your teams to have phone calls or video chats from their computer. Offering customizable meeting hosting capabilities for 500+ participants, Zoom can even handle large projects and teams.
Ready to Streamline Creative Projects in 2020?
While these tools can help you start 2020 on a high note, opening communication channels is just the first step in keeping your projects running smoothly. Check out this guest post from our partner, Wrike, to learn 9 ways to streamline your creative projects.
