Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

December 2022

nTask vs Airtable vs Asana: Which Platform Ranks Best In 2023

As the world moves towards a more digitalized future, more and more companies are turning to cloud-based software to help them manage their operations. Three such platforms, nTask, Airtable, and Asana, are widely regarded as the best in their respective fields, and it can be challenging to decide which one is best for your business. In this article, we are doing a comparison of nTask vs Airtable vs Asana to help you make an informed decision.

Slack vs Microsoft Teams: Which Tool is Ahead of the Game?

With the onset of the pandemic and the shift in workplace behaviors, there was a sudden need to facilitate collaboration and digitization to enhance productivity and maintain consistency between team members across different locations and time zones. Satya Nadella and Bill Gates wanted to bid $8 billion USD to acquire Slack, the team chat SaaS company. Their meeting took an extraordinary turn, and instead of buying Slack, they decided to create their own app.

How to use Slack built-in functions

Modular apps offer a variety of new and interesting features. Built-in functions are unique to modular apps. They offer a way to execute native Slack functionality without the extra logic. You’ll love them! This video covers how to implement built-in functions and walks through a couple of examples, as seen on the Welcome Bot sample app.

22 productivity tools developers must try in 2023

You’re trying to focus on coding, but office chatter keeps disturbing you. You want to reach your teammates, but they don’t respond to their emails. You’re trying to find a piece of information related to your current project, but you don’t know where to start. Do these scenarios sound familiar? We hope not. Developers’ tasks are complex as is. But sometimes, productivity issues can add to their woe.

Is Slack HIPAA-compliant? 5 alternatives for healthcare organizations

Slack is one of the most popular instant messaging tools for organizations of all sizes. Due to its easy interface and features, many clinics and healthcare establishments prefer to use Slack for their everyday communication. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is a law that guides how to protect sensitive PHI (patient health information).

25 Super True Mental Health Memes That Will Make You LOL

Do you know that mental health memes not only make us laugh but also help us feel less stressed? Technology has made it easy to generate fun-filled relatable mental breakdown memes, emotional memes that can be shared with coworkers, clients, and others. This helps reduce stress in various ways, regardless of the industry. Let me familiarise you with mental health before you start thinking about it.

10 Ways nTask Assists Online Collaboration In The Workplace

nTask is all about making work easier and more efficient. We know that online collaboration is key to the future of the workplace, so we’ve designed our platform to make it as easy as possible for employees to share and collaborate on tasks. In this article, we’ll take a look at 10 ways nTask assists online collaboration in the workplace. From creating task boards to tracking progress, we’ll cover everything you need to make collaborating on tasks a breeze.

10 ways to improve teacher-student communication in remote classrooms

Distance learning and digital education have opened up many opportunities for students worldwide, allowing them to learn flexibly and conveniently. With course materials and lectures made available online, students can learn on their own terms. By leveraging online tools and resources, teachers can provide a personalized learning experience for students' needs and learning styles. Therefore, effective teacher-student communication is key to ensuring the success of digital education.

6 Simple Ways to Boost Productivity at Work: Gain More and Lose Less

It’s not always obvious what exactly kills your productivity. According to a CareerBuilder survey, about 75 percent of employers say that more than two hours of efficient work are lost every day. It is very difficult to strike the balance between creating a collaborative environment and respecting the need for focus. What is the reason for that?

10 Remote Work Tools for a Technical Project Manager

After the pandemic, remote work became mainstream. In IT, hiring global developers has become necessary for those who want access to a better talent pool. However, most of the benefits that remote work brings to the table are impossible without understanding how to enhance collaboration and dynamics between remote employees. Having the right working tools helps teams organize better and more efficiently, allowing them to coordinate time zones, manage workload, keep track of projects, and more.

How to Send Multilingual Emails with Courier and Crowdin

Email localization is a strategy to effectively raise brand recognition, increase subscribers, and boost sales. It translates email marketing campaigns into clients' local languages and cultural contexts, but encompasses much more than just translating message headers and subject lines. International email marketing isn’t as complicated as it seems.

8 ways to fortify cyber security while working remotely

In 2020, companies were pushed to adapt to an unprecedented global pandemic. They shifted rapidly from an office-based workforce to a remote one. And with that went the protection of having employees connected through on-premise secure servers, which called for a remote work cyber security infrastructure to be installed. Employees had to configure the official devices through their home networks, and the IT department had to work at scale for remote work cyber security.

Building Secure Chat Experiences That Convert, Engage and Retain Users

Everything starts with a conversation. 🗨 The world’s leading organizations understand this and make sure chat is available within their mobile apps or websites. However, getting it done is not so easy. There are many things to consider. Choosing to rely on third-party messaging platforms comes with heavy compromises on data security, privacy, and ownership. 🔒

The 3 building blocks of Slack's modular apps

Modular Slack apps are composed of 3 building blocks: functions, workflows, and triggers. With them, you can assemble automations that are shareable, reusable, and easy to maintain. This combination of features means you can start building apps and automating processes quickly. In this video, we cover each building block so you know what they offer and how they work together.

13 Proven collaboration tools your team will love

The best collaboration tools automate menial tasks and put everything teams need in one place. That improves the employee experience and collaboration in the workplace, helping teams feel empowered and engaged. That’s why the collaboration tools we’ve compiled here: They’ve also been widely adopted across many industries and locations, so you can be confident that they’ve proven themselves in the real world. Here are the best collaboration tools that made the cut.

The (A)sync Game

As knowledge workers, we often ask, “Does this need to be a meeting?” When the answer is no, we are faced with the challenge of asynchronous communication. In this interactive session, we’ll play a game where we will decide and discuss how to communicate and collaborate with others at work: sync or async.You’ll also get a taste of Miro’s latest asynchronous collaboration feature: Talktrack!

19 Best Online Collaboration Tools in 2023

Online collaboration tools are web-design platforms, a technology that helps businesses or organizations connect, chat, share projects, delegate assignments, or share files from anywhere in the world. They greatly support teamwork even if all the parties are in different locations, generating transparency, hence high productivity as an end product to any organization.

Why Avoiding Employee Burnout is Essential for Companies and Their Workers

Employee burnout is a type of workplace stress – but not necessarily caused simply by an over-demanding workload. The person suffering from employee burnout probably doesn’t realize at first that it is happening to them. They say, for example, that a frog could boil to death without feeling any discomfort – as it is a cold-blooded creature that adapts to the temperature of its environment. In a similar way, employee burnout can ‘creep up’ on a person.

How to improve internal communication: 9 tips

One of the five key challenges that internal comms teams have to manage is a lack of employee engagement. When employees aren’t engaged, they don’t read company communications. If they don’t read your comms, you can’t reach them to improve employee engagement. It’s a vicious cycle that plays out again and again. How can dedicated comms teams break the cycle and improve internal communications?

6 common customer communication challenges that FinTechs face

Organizations in FinTech are increasingly met with customer communication challenges due to their rapid growth. What are these challenges, and more importantly, how can you solve them? We’ve asked an expert: FinTech consultant Ellen Cibula.‍ Financial technology, or "FinTech," is a blanket term to describe any company that provides financial services using software and modern technology. The industry has exploded in recent years as more people opt for digital-only banking options.

Basecamp 4 NEW Feature - Just Following

Basecamp now makes it easy to stay in the loop of a project, without getting all the notifications. “Just following” allows people to have access to projects and participate without being overwhelmed by notifications that aren’t necessarily relevant to them. You can change people’s access type any time. If someone’s “on the project”, their avatar shows up on the project card, and they’re automatically subscribed to the Campfire chat room. If someone’s “just following”, they aren’t listed on the card, and they’re only notified if someone directly @mentions them or assigns them something.

BundesMessenger is a milestone in Germany's ground-breaking vision

It’s incredibly exciting to see BWI, the IT services provider of the German Armed Forces, launching an official beta version of BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration (öffentliche Verwaltung ÖV) including federal, state and local authorities.

4 Ways to Promote Upward Communication Across Remote Teams

Poor communication could be shrinking your paycheck and cost a single company over $60 million annually. Small companies aren’t immune to poor communication woes, either. Communication blunders cost $420,000 per year in companies with 100 employees or fewer. Big or small, poor communication costs companies money. This loss of revenue can certainly impact employee salaries and bonuses.

7 Ways Managers Can Support Employees' Mental Health and Well-Being

As a manager, you will want to do whatever you can to support your employees’ mental health and well-being. After all, employees who feel happy at work are 13% more productive and are much more likely to approach the inevitable obstacles of their job proactively. Individuals who have a good work-life balance are also healthier and will thus require less time off. With their mental health and well-being nourished, employees are much more able to give their best every day.

Why you need to think about internationalization before you start developing software

Starting a new project is exciting. There’s so much to think about — like how to make it scalable, reliable, maintainable, and secure. With so many moving parts to juggle, internationalization — or the process of designing software so it can be translated into many languages — is often not your first priority. Today, Mattermost is shipped in 21 languages. The entire Mattermost project contains more than 64,000 words in 9,500 sentences.

Creating a cohesive employee experience after a merger with strong internal communications

Savvy organizations know that this process starts with keeping the lines of communication open. And this is a two-way street. Oftentimes, communication is a top-down process where employees aren’t comfortable asking questions. However, with the right internal communications and employee experience strategy in place post-merger, companies can create a space where employees feel seen and heard. And this keeps employee burnout at bay, frustrations low, and contributes to a cohesive company culture.

12 best collaboration tools for DevOps teams

DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of techniques that product teams embrace to reduce the software development life cycle, improve collaboration and visibility. It accelerates time to market for new updates while also ensuring the top-notch quality of releases. DevOps involves the combination of software development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) personnel into cross-functional teams capable of building, running, and monitoring their product releases.

Jira Work Management Monthly Minute: November 2022 | Atlassian

Get the latest Jira Work Management updates in our Monthly Minute. Now you can drag and drop unscheduled tasks into the Calendar view and expand or collapse tasks in the List view. Plus, check out the Jira Work Management Chrome extension. Jira Work Management makes it easy for business teams to collaborate, align, and deliver work, all in one place.

Collaboration made simple: Communicate your ideas anytime, anywhere with Talktrack

It’s not uncommon for knowledge workers today to be confronted by an impenetrable block of back-to-back meetings upon opening their work calendars each day. Our research shows that 40% of today’s knowledge workers say in-person and virtual meetings are the most draining part of their typical work day. In some cases, email and instant messaging have become the default alternative to meetings, but they’re imperfect solutions, scrubbing communication of essential context and tone.

Why an abundance mindset is key to getting hybrid work right

The emergence of hybrid as the default way of working within the corporate world is one of the most important and long-lasting changes driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. In theory, at least, it’s a welcome change for employees, who have expressed a preference for hybrid models. Chief among the reasons employees give for this preference is the ability to balance the convenience of remote work with the collaborative, social, and cultural benefits of working in person.

Facilitation Can Get You a Seat at the Table

The word “collaboration” shows up in almost every job description. Leaders have to unite teams across cultures, manage across geographies, and gather input across practices. However, most meetings are designed around presentations - a communication tool not a collaboration tool. Jake will share three basic facilitation techniques that will transform your meetings into active collaboration spaces.

MS 365 ban from German schools sparks implications for public sector organizations in the whole EU

After a 2 year-long investigation, the German Government’s Data Protection Office (Datenschutzkonferenz or DSK) has concluded that Microsoft 365 is not GDPR compliant and banned its use in schools all over Germany. This news further confirms a Europe-wide trend of government-related institutions moving away from US-based tech providers.

Working with Clients in Basecamp

When you add clients into a Basecamp project, you can choose what parts of the project they can see. This allows you to have internal discussions with your team right alongside conversations with your client while keeping things separated. In this video, Kimberly from Basecamp's Customer Success team walks through the benefits of working with clients inside of Basecamp, how to add clients into your Basecamp account, assign them to a project, and how to change the visibility of project elements.

Why your employee retention efforts are failing and how a better EX can turn it around

Before we explore those options, here are some stats which reveal the true state of things as it relates to employee retention. Additionally, Workforce Institute’s 2021 Retention Report found that around two-thirds of employee departures could have been prevented. And in response to this employee exit, companies are switching up how they approach the workplace and work spaces, growing and enriching their employee experience.

New features announcement | Distributed 22

Discover new solutions for collaborating, creating, and innovating in an increasingly digitized and distributed world of work. At Distributed 22 we announced exciting product updates as well as community requests — including Talktrack, Interactive Presentation Mode, and integrations for YouTube, Looker, and Confluence — which will create even better spaces for teams to collaborate and enable new ways of working.

Why Your Board Should Adopt a Centralized Document Repository

The information every board document contains is the cornerstone of an organization and a board’s success. This is why all organizations must place a premium on secure access and storage of their documents. More than a step to keep pace with the demands of the global pandemic, adopting a centralized document repository for your organization signals a positive tread in your digital transformation journey.

Board videos, new apps & integrations: Here's what we released in November 2022

This November, we held our annual conference, Distributed ’22, where we shared solutions for collaborating, creating, and innovating in an increasingly digitized and distributed world of work. We also announced some pretty exciting product updates — including Talktrack, Interactive Presentation Mode, and integrations for YouTube, Looker, and Confluence — which will create even better spaces for teams to collaborate and enable new ways of working.

10 Miro templates to help your organization achieve its 2023 objectives

As this year winds down, you may be eager to begin or continue planning for the next one. It’s an exciting time that’s filled with brainstorming, bold ideas, and big dreams as you and your team enthusiastically identify all of the possibilities for the coming year. But you also know that you need to balance all of that ambitious fantasizing with some intention, strategy, and organization.

Deliver better EX and minimize tech stack needs with the right intranet platform

The workplace looks different these days and so does the employee experience. Since 2019, we’ve seen remote work grow. In fact, between 2019 and 2021 the number of remote workers tripled. With workers at home, in the office, and on the road companies need to have targeted communication options that accommodate these diverse engagement needs. Technology is supposed to enhance communications, but sometimes it becomes its own monster.

10 tools for secure and effective distance learning

Distance learning tools provide students with flexibility and convenience, enabling them to take courses at their own pace. In addition, it offers the opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and skills while still retaining the freedom to pursue other interests or commitments. Even through a computer screen, online collaborative learning tools can keep students interested and engaged. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that online education is continuing to grow.

The best Miroverse templates for your virtual or hybrid holiday parties

After a year spent working hard and tackling goals, your team deserves a chance to kick back and celebrate. And holiday parties are opportunities for people to connect outside of the demands of their daily to-do lists and loosen up for a little bit of fun together. Fortunately, you don’t need to be co-located to let the good times roll.

10 Ways to Improve Collaboration Between Teams in a Remote Company

In a remote company, the success of the business often relies on the effectiveness of team collaboration. When team members can work together, they can produce great results. However, poor collaboration can make it difficult for a remote company to achieve its goals. In this article, we will discuss ten ways to improve collaboration between teams in a remote company. These tips help your team work together more effectively and achieve great results!

How to communicate effectively when working remotely: 10 proven tips

Have you ever noticed how difficult it can be to communicate with your colleagues remotely? It can be challenging to communicate effectively with remote teams for several reasons, like lack of face-to-face interaction, time zone differences, and difficulties with technology. In fact, 20% of workers say communication is their number one challenge while working from home.

Live Demo: Convert your MS teams as HR Help Desk Channel.

Convert your MS teams as HR Help Desk Channel. In this video, you can learn about the following:- What is Workativ? Workativ is a FREE no-code SaaS platform for companies to quickly build, automate, and deploy conversational AI chatbots with app workflow automation out-of-the-box in less than 60 mins. No coding is required. Workativ differentiates itself by focusing on employee IT & HR support for digital and hybrid workplace transformation.

Live Demo: Convert your MS teams as IT Help Service Desk Channel

Convert your MS teams as IT Help Desk Channel. In this video, you can learn about the following:- What is Workativ? Workativ is a FREE no-code SaaS platform for companies to quickly build, automate, and deploy conversational AI chatbots with app workflow automation out-of-the-box in less than 60 mins. No coding is required. Workativ differentiates itself by focusing on employee IT & HR support for digital and hybrid workplace transformation.

Tips on How to Effectively Manage a Cross-generational Team

A challenge that’s increasingly common in workplaces today is that many generations often work together in one team. Managing a cross-generational team can be challenging. The generation gap between members requires managers to understand the unique habits, behaviors and preferences of different generations. A prime example of age differences is in the use of technology.

What is Downward Communication? Benefits, Drawbacks and Examples

Did you know that 71% of employees say they’re more productive when they feel connected to their colleagues through communication? This shows the importance of effective communication in the workplace. No doubt, the communication techniques used in a work environment affect employee performance and collaboration efforts. Top-down communication is a common form of communication in the workplace and has both positive and negative impacts on collaboration efforts and employee engagement.

6 essential employee experience metrics & kpis to track

In the year 1800, in a revolutionary move away from corporal punishment in the workplace, Robert Owen introduced the ‘Silent Monitor,’ a wooden block with a different color on each of its four sides that could indicate employee behavior on a scale from bad to excellent. The field of performance management continues to evolve by degrees since, far from the miserable work conditions of the industrial revolution, but not yet attaining an enlightened age of business.

6 Popular LiveChat Agent Software Features

Livechat agent software is the most useful tool for online businesses, providing direct communication between you and your website visitors. It is one of the best tools that you can use to improve your customer experience. In fact, research from J.D Power shows that 42% of customers prefer live chat rather than support through phone or email.

Gaslighting at Work: 6 Tips to Overcome it in 2023

In the 1944 film Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman plays a woman who is manipulated by her husband to the point where she questions her own memory and even sanity. FYI, Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for that film. This phenomenon is not limited to fiction, nor is it confined to relationships. Gaslighting can happen in workplaces as well. Someone could be casting a manipulative web around you without your knowledge. You need to act wise and fast.

5 ways to improve patient experience in 2023

Today, patient experience encapsulates much more than it used to. Providing optimal healthcare is not enough on its own: it includes satisfaction with the overall service, which includes more than just a treatment. A satisfactory patient experience has the potential to drive profit and quality improvements in your practice, so it's no wonder that many healthcare providers are looking into improving it.

Greg Sanker on HR and IT Collaboration to Improve Employee Experience

HR and IT collaboration may just be the answer to all of your employee experience problems. In a world where team members and companies alike are facing immense challenges with adapting and changing, IT solutions are what the HR department needs to enhance employee experience, and the people element is what the IT department lacks to create a holistic technology solution for everyone.