Best Company Collaboration Tools: Large Businesses

If you have a large business or corporation, you may have a significant in-house staff, remote workers, and teams in other locations, such as satellite locations. You may even have different places that specialize in a single objective. However, your teams may find collaborating more difficult as your company expands. Therefore, you should investigate communication and collaboration tools for large businesses.

Collaboration Tools: What Are They?

Depending on your needs, you can find many collaboration tools. Some are applications, while others are complete platforms, and some are available as full software packages. You can choose technical tools, such as communication platforms and project management software, or simple options that offer flip charts, blank pages, whiteboard space, or sticky notes.

Types of Collaboration Tools for Big Corporations

Big business tools can include on-premises options that streamline productivity among in-house teams and remote tools that allow collaboration among individuals in different locations. Collaboration tools include communication options, including videoconferencing, file sharing, and instant messaging. You can also share calendars.

Task management software includes project management options where multiple people can work on different or the same tasks in single or multiple projects through task assignment, planning, scheduling, and task boards. Document management options help your team cooperate on writing and producing content, editing documents, creating templates, and tracking and storing files.

Most teams need access to the same document or files so that you may adopt file-sharing applications. Cloud storage also allows file sharing but also offers valuable system backup capabilities. Knowledge-sharing apps help you customize a library or knowledge base for your teams.

Benefits & Drawbacks of Using Collaboration Tools for Your Large Business

Collaboration tools for business have both benefits and drawbacks.

Benefits

Benefits of collaboration tools include:

• Expanded internal and external communication

• Increased productivity and convenience

• Process streamlining

• File and project sharing both inside and outside the organization

• Security encryption, passwords, firewalls, and authentication options for sensitive data

These tools allow you to work effectively with remote workers, and moving some of your staff offsite can save thousands every month.

You can also save money using these tools. Some eliminate or reduce redundant tasks. You can find free or subscription-based tools. Finally, you can track and analyze your projects and the collaboration tool.

Drawbacks

Collaboration tools have a few drawbacks, including:

• Increased email and notification clutter

• Lack of in-person meetings and collaboration leads to feelings of isolation

• Possible increased confusion about task assignments and timelines

• Cloud-based and mobile security concerns

Because you can share your projects with unlimited people, it is easy to include too many people, impacting security, effectiveness, and productivity. In addition, each collaboration tool has different pricing structures.

You still need to create and manage project plans and clear communication, task, and tracking guidelines.

Recommended Collaboration Tools for Big Companies

Recommended business collaboration tools may include communication tools for instant messaging, such as Slack and Google Chat, as well as those for videoconferencing, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Skype. Consider Microsoft Whiteboard, Micro, and Google Jamboard if you need whiteboard software. For project management, research Monday, Trello, Basecamp, and Asana. You can share calendars with Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCal.  

Look into Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and iCloud for cloud storage and file sharing, and finally, Slab and Notion. Iso and Bit.ai allow you to create knowledge bases and document creation.

As you search for communication and collaboration tools for large businesses, start with your business needs and pain points and find the options that fill these gaps without busting your budget.