5 Tools for Building a Collaborative Workspace for Your Team

col·lab·o·ra·tion – “the action of working with someone to produce or create something”

Building a collaborative workspace for your team in this day and time is essential for growth and efficiency in small business.

With a growing number of businesses using online collaboration tools to save money, reduce overhead and lower business expenses it’s easy to see why the number of teams working remotely in businesses continue to increase.  In fact according to Clinked.com, 75% of businesses say that collaboration tools will be important to their business.

Take a look at this infographic below concerning The State of Online Collaboration for Business

How to Build a Collaborative Workspace for Your Team

To build an online collaborative workspace, here are 5 tools that you can use:

1.   Box.com – If you haven’t figured it out by now, I am absolutely in loveee with Box.com.  It’s one of my absolute favorite online collaboration tools that I use a lot for Small Business Sense and in my other business endeavors.

Box is very easy to use and setup and allows you to share, update and send documents to fellow members on your team via a secure connection. One of the best features I’ve found when using Box.com is that you can create folders, upload documents to them and give specific access to certain files and folders that you upload to the site.

2.   Google Docs – features a web-based office suite of tools that allow you to create, edit and share documents online.   Google docs also currently offers 15GB of free space that you can use to store your documents.

3.  Trello – A free organization and work flow and tracking system that allows you to easily customize all of the items on your “to do lists”.

4.  Basecamp – (Referred by a fellow Entrepreneur on Google Plus) – Basecamp is a cloud based project management application that you can use to share your projects status and updates with fellow members of your team.  Included in Basecamp is a calendar for tracking important dates and events, a project tracking page and page showing the progress of all of the projects.

5.  DropBox – who doesn’t love Dropbox?  Its free to use, has an easy and user friendly interface, and is a great tool for collaborating and sharing with your team members remotely.  Dropbox allows you to create folders that you can easily share and grant your team members access to them.

I would love to hear from you guys what tools you are using in your business to work with your team members.  Cheers all!