If you read our last blog post, you will already know about the benefits that remote working can bring to your business and its employees. The savings in both time and money across the board are plain to see as your business will save money on the purchase and maintenance of hardware and software and your employees will save money on commuting.

However, none of these savings whether time or money are worth anything if your employees do not have the tools necessary for good collaboration online. Your team needs to be able to talk and work together much in the same way as they would in an office. Working remotely means that you cannot simply tap your colleague on the shoulder and ask them a question about the project that you are both working on.

Fortunately, there are some great cloud-based tools out there that can drastically improve the collaboration of your employees. Messengers and other group chat applications, email clients and cloud-storage platforms can all be found readily available for free or for affordable monthly subscriptions.

Even better is that you will find suites of tools that will package all of these tools in one place such as Microsoft Office 365.

Office 365 for Team Collaboration

While there are some great individual cloud-based tools on the market that you can use, Office 365 bundles just about everything you will need for your remote workers. Need your team to be able to communicate, there is an app for that, want to be able to store and share files with your team, there is an app for that too!

You have all of the usual suspects such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint that your team can use to create, share and collaborate on documents but there are some other great tools too that will aid collaboration too.

OneDrive offers cloud storage for your important files, Outlook is an email and calendar app that will keep you organized and OneNote will be the app that replaces the notebook on your desk.

Microsoft Teams Completes Office 365

The latest addition to the suite, however, is what ties everything together. Microsoft Teams is what will become the central hub for communication for the many teams and groups working remotely for your business. Want to speak to an individual, a select team of people of everybody in your organization at once? Teams is the app that gives you that ability.

This collaboration software provides the ability for your teams to enjoy group chats, group calls and group file-sharing. Basically, this is the platform that will replace the need for a physical office, as it will essentially become that office.

With the suite of tools that Office 365 provides, you can essentially run your entire business remotely. It is an all-in-one package that covers just about everything that you and your employees will need to collaborate effectively and therefore bring the ultimate in productivity for your SME.