How we work as a team

It doesn't matter your role, we all work as part of a team. These days, there are lots of ways to collaborate with others across an organization. Some organizations use Miro and Mentimeter. For smaller teams, chat board and forum solutions may fill the need, such as Discourse and Discord. We asked our community to share what tools they use for team collaboration.

Seth Kenlon has a few favorite tools:

I don't do a whole lot of real time collaboration, but when I do, I prefer these tools:

Etherpad is an open source collaborative editor, and I use it sometimes.

Drawpile is an open source whiteboard application, and I use that to sketch out ideas with collaborators.

Jitsi is an open source video conferencing software.

Lauren Pritchett adds:

My organization is facing a turning point with how we approach hybrid work. Many folks crave in-person collaboration at the office, while other team members remain and prefer remote work.

Recently, my department had a big 2-day workshop. Most people traveled to headquarters to participate. Unfortunately, some people could not attend in-person. Or worse, they had every intention of being there in-person, but airline fiascos held them back. (Travel in 2023 is not as glamorous as it once was!)

Wherever participants were sitting during the workshop, we heavily relied on the virtual whiteboarding tool Miro for our brainstorming exercises including “MoSCoW” (Must have, Should have, Could have, Will not have). It's a pretty robust tool and it takes some getting used to, but I have learned to love it. I like that I can jot down my ideas ahead of time as homework or participate live. It works for in-person, remote, and hybrid collaboration.

Jim Hall says:

I am a consultant and many of my clients are spread out geographically. That means most of my workshops and training programs are remote. I use BlueJeans for my video conferencing platform. BlueJeans has several online collaboration tools that I find useful.

Robin Blank says:

Like many organizations, we use Zoom to meet online. I like that Zoom supports Annotations so a participant can highlight items on a shared screen.

We also use Google Suite, and we often use the collaboration tools there. The Jamboard is my favorite! You can set up a virtual whiteboard and attach "sticky notes" to it. We use it with small group breakout discussions and that does a great job, where each group can use their own "corner" of the Jamboard to collect their ideas. When the groups come together to share their results, everyone else can see the Jamboard for all of the other groups.