Whether you find it difficult to keep track of time, be productive, or stay motivated, the new digital workplace can be challenging.It’s not just the lack of structure that is troublesome. It's also the frustration of getting and staying in contact while understanding communication with colleagues without face-to-face interactions.
This includes every type of business communication, including formal and informal, synchronous and asynchronous, etc. As you can imagine, different types of business communication requires different business tools depending on the circumstances.
Luckily, there are a number of available tools and apps to solve these communication and collaboration problems within remote working teams. In this guide, we will examine some of the ways we can improve how we interact and work collaboratively in the face of these COVID-19 hurdles.
We’ll then discuss the office suite applications from Zoho Collaboration using communication apps such as Mail, Cliq, and Connect. Each of these tools can be used separately or as together as part of a communication and collaboration platform.
Adapting to the lockdown struggles as a remote team
Around the world, professionals are being forced to work from home and adapt to remote working. This can be a struggle when there are no clear boundaries, a busy household full of children who are currently home from school, and no colleagues to motivate you and keep you accountable. Keeping track of assignments (such asTasks in Zoho Mail) and workflows suddenly becomes a challenging hurdle, alongside isolation or social distancing.
Choosing the right tools for remote work collaboration is essential for everything from employee communication to effective marketing. You might find that your team and partners may be strewn over a wide array of apps.
With so many communication apps available, the irony is that any benefit these tools promise to provide actually turns into a frustration because no one is on the same platform. As a team leader or manager, it’s usually your call to decide on a collaboration app that works well for you and your team. That’s where Cliq, Mail, and Connect can come to your aid.
Zoho Mail
A quality email service is one of the most important tools to have when it comes to business communication, and in some cases can be more effective than social media for getting in touch with potential customers or generating leads.
You can also use Zoho Mail to establish official records of some conversations. If necessary, you can transfer communications to Mail from Cliq or Connect. Integrating between Cliq and Mail, in particular, is a relatively simple process and helps you to communicate with your contacts directly from the Zoho Mail interface. You can stay connected to your colleagues without leaving your mailbox.
That’s why you’ll be glad to hear that Zoho Mail is one of the most secure and user-friendly email hosting providers currently available. Keeping your inbox organized and clean can vastly improve security and privacy, make it easier to keep track of emails, and makes it easier for the administrator to customize their network to keep communications streamlined.
Keep in mind that email communication can also be a vulnerable avenue for potential online hacks. Not only do we use it for most of our private communication, but it also plays a key role in exchanging sensitive information such as login details.
Common services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail work well enough for general purposes, but when conducting business, it’s highly recommended to use a more specialized app with enhanced security features. Zoho Mail comes with end-to-end S/MIME message encryption that is among the most secure in the industry.
Zoho Cliq
Zoho Cliq is a real-time messaging application that streamlines communication with your colleagues. It’s recommended for any communications that require an immediate response. It gives you the ability to switch to video and audio calls as needed and share the screen with other participants.
Cliq can integrate easily with Zoho Mail (and various other third-party applications such as Github or Google Drive) and also allows you to organize your various conversations easily. It includes features such as gifs, emoticons, translations, and other quick actions such as adding notes and tasks from chat, getting a transcript of a document, and creating channels for inter and intra-team group chat communications. You can also use Cliq to make organization-wide announcements.
Cliq is designed to improve productivity, boost your mental energy, and automate mundane tasks. It can keep you from carrying out pointless jobs and simplifies your workflow so you can stay focused on creating new and exciting solutions or projects for your business.
The number of internet users has been steadily growing for years. Almost half the world’s population is online, which means marketing and networking opportunities are abundant, and customers, clients, and employees are more accessible than ever before.
Equally true is the fact that this new digital workplace isn’t going away with the pandemic, and is predicted to be a permanent feature in the post-COVID-19 working world. Investing in high-quality digital infrastructure such as Cliq will return many business benefits over the next years and decades.
Zoho Connect
Zoho Connect is a team collaboration app designed to make it easier for teams to work together through automation while integrating with a number of other important applications, including Zoho Campaigns, Google Drive, Asana, and Zapier.
Specifically, Zoho Connect is preferred for conversations between social intranet teams. It can also be used for organization-wide announcements, sharing general blogs and updates, conducting a Q&A session, or engaging with customers on an asynchronous forum.
Of course, features such as instant messaging, separating teams into private groups, and tools to promote employee motivation and engagement should all be things that a business manager looks for when choosing a collaboration app.
However, work and communication carried out online can increase the data collection load between teams, which can provide a great opportunity for many businesses to collect customer data and use it to expand and grow their business. This begs the question of how safe this move to online communication really is.
We’ve been told how careful we must be when leaving confidential data lying around, but have you thought about the online tools and apps your team is currently using?
Free apps and online services may sound great, but not many consider that these companies profit from passing your sensitive data to other companies and organizations. Even the big-name companies that usually pride themselves on how they handle sensitive information can fall victim to these issues.
This is why Zoho Connect comes with a top-notch security system that includes 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standards (AES) and a secret chat feature to help ensure that your organizational data is always safe. AES relies on block cipher algorithms to ensure that your data is encrypted safely, and unlike its predecessor DES, has never been broken to date.
Conclusion
Team communication and collaboration is essential for any business to be successful, especially in a cluttered digital age where remote working is fast becoming the norm. Choosing the correct apps and tools that match your business and team’s needs is vital, as well as protecting the sensitive and confidential files and information that is shared on a daily basis between remote teams.
As we progress into a new normal, digital advances and global changes should be viewed as an exciting adventure and not one that causes more stress and risk.
Author bio: Gary Stevens
Gary Stevens is the CTO of Hosting Canada, a website that expertly reviews hosting services to help readers build online businesses and blogs.
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