Imagine a project deadline is looming, but you can't access the information you need because it's buried in email chains and scattered documents. To make matters worse, the only person with the answers is on vacation. It's frustrating, isn't it?

It’s in a company’s best interest for its employees to communicate and collaborate. Effective collaboration reduces misinformation and helps everyone achieve their goals successfully. Moreover, it enhances understanding of job requirements, promotes accountability, and cultivates a strong sense of belonging.

Team collaboration is key to employee productivity as well. In fact, 70% of survey respondents believe that collaboration significantly increases team productivity. 

This means businesses need to provide resources and tools that facilitate internal employee communication and create an environment that encourages teamwork. The result? Happy and productive employees.

But how can you reduce communication problems and make it easy for employees to share ideas?

The secret lies in internal collaboration tools. These platforms help your employees connect, improve communication, exchange ideas, and make them feel as if they are in the same room, even if they are located in different parts of the world. 

With a variety of tools available, from simple to advanced, choosing the right one is essential. 

Therefore, in this internal collaboration tools guide, we’ll dive into the different types of internal collaboration tools, and their capabilities, and help you choose the perfect one to address your specific needs. 

What are Internal Collaboration Tools?

Think of internal collaboration tools as a central hub for your team, where everyone comes together to share ideas, ask questions, exchange important documentation, and provide feedback. 

These tools offer various features to support real-time communication, including chat, video conferencing, audio messaging, and file-sharing.

There are many different internal collaboration tools available, each offering unique features to fit your needs. Here are a few examples:

  • Document collaboration: Tools like Google Docs allow multiple people to edit and work on the same document at the same time.
  • Project management: Platforms like Trello and Asana help teams stay organized by assigning tasks, tracking progress, and ensuring everyone is on the same page for projects.
  • Communication: These tools, like instant messaging platforms, make it easy for employees to chat and share ideas in real time.

Businesses rely heavily on these internal collaboration tools. So much so that 98% of UK businesses currently use at least one team collaboration tool. These tools are crucial in supporting employees as they work collectively towards specific goals and in fostering a collaborative work environment.

Benefits of using Internal Collaboration Tools

Internal collaboration tools can help businesses in many ways. Here's how you can benefit from incorporating collaboration tools in your organization.

Improved Internal Communication

Internal communication is crucial for any company as it acts as a bloodstream, transferring important information from one place to another. It helps employees stay informed about important decisions and stay connected with their colleagues and superiors.

Office collaboration tools help businesses by providing a space where internal communication flows smoothly, quickly, and more efficiently. They offer practical and effective solutions for real-time communication and provide a centralized place for sharing information, documents, and feedback.

Increased Productivity

When employees can collaborate effectively and share opinions and critical information without obstacles, it minimizes miscommunication, misunderstandings, and errors which leads to increasing productivity. 

Employee collaboration software enable real-time communication among employees. These tools offer various collaboration options such as commenting and suggesting which contribute to the accurate, timely, and precise completion of the work. Moreover, having a central platform where multiple employees can meet and work together helps employees alleviate nervousness and increase motivation leading to higher-quality work.

Better Organization

In many companies, multiple people work on a single project. Team collaboration software helps managers allocate work tasks more effectively, reducing confusion and dilemmas. 

Collaborative project management tools are ideal for this purpose because they allow employees to assign tasks, maintain a clear overview of their own and others' responsibilities, and receive important information such as deadlines and task-related details.

Improved Knowledge Sharing

Modern internal collaboration tools streamline knowledge sharing. They allow employees to easily and efficiently connect with colleagues, and share their expertise, opinions, and knowledge on specific topics. 

Additionally, some collaboration platforms, like knowledge-based software, provide a central location for all essential work information to be readily available to all employees at any time.

Flexibility and Remote Work Support

Remote work would not be possible without technology that knows no geographical boundaries. Collaborative platforms have become integral to almost every company's operations, enabling hybrid work or operations without physical presence. If your company offers perks such as remote or hybrid working, these tools will help your employees stay connected even when they are not physically together.

Types of Internal Collaboration Tools

To choose the optimal internal collaboration tool for your business, it's important to understand the different types available. While many platforms offer multiple features, they often serve specific purposes. Here, we will explore the main categories of collaboration tools and their unique functionalities.

  • Knowledge management systems - These systems play a critical role in helping organizations capture, store, and share knowledge, thereby simplifying employee access to information and resources. 
  • Meeting collaboration software - As the name suggests, meeting collaboration software is primarily created to allow users to have face-to-face conversations. These tools play a crucial role in connecting remote employees and helping teammates collaborate more effectively.
  • Project management software - Depending on the sophistication of the application these tools help companies organize their work tasks, schedule tasks, ease communication, and help in budget management, time management, and many other important areas. 
  • Document collaboration - Document collaboration software is a platform that allows multiple people to work on a single document and provide input simultaneously. These tools are valuable for ensuring real-time updates and facilitating team efforts in projects. 
  • Online spreadsheets - Online spreadsheet tools support collaboration features that enable users to work together on a specific project. Some software also allows users to have a real-time conversation, and leave suggestions, comments, and add tags.
  • Shared calendars - Calendars have collaborative features as well. They come in handy for employees whose jobs require them to have multiple meetings. Collaboration calendars ease the scheduling process by giving everyone a chance to choose a date and time that fits their schedule.

Top 9 Best Internal Collaboration Tools

Here is a list of the top 9 internal collaboration tools for 2024.

Helpjuice 

Helpjuice is a knowledge base software that serves as a central repository for all the important information your employees need. As such it simplifies the onboarding process for new employees, and streamlines workflows for existing ones. With Helpjuice, information is within hand’s reach. Everyone in the company can access crucial documents and information anytime, and from anywhere. Additionally, if you are a business owner, this platform can help you create effective help pages, enabling customers to quickly find answers to their questions. 

Key features:

  • Smart Analytics
  • Ability to assign users to groups
  • Over 12 themes to install
  • Free expert customization of your knowledge base
  • Multiple editor and authoring features

Wizardshot

Wizardshot is an AI-powered tool that makes the tutorial-making process a breeze. It records your screen, follows the steps you take, and transforms every action into a clear, easy-to-understand tutorial that you can share with your employees. Wizardshot integrates with Helpjuice, allowing you to store all your important tutorials in one place easily.

Key features:

  • Smart Blur
  • Share Edit, Download
  • AI-powered search 
  • Easy integration with Helpjuice

Slack 

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Slack is a team communication platform, which has been owned by Salesforce since 2020. Many companies use this application to manage internal communications and coordinate their teams. Slack supports a range of features that make the collaboration between users easier. With this tool, you can create channels tailored to each of your departments or projects, share information effortlessly, exchange a variety of documents, and even connect with external collaborators.

Key features: 

  • Message and file history 
  • Slack huddles 
  • Audio and video clips 
  • Work with external people 
  • Custom templates

Google Docs

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Google Docs is an online word-processing tool that allows multiple people to work and collaborate on the same document. With Google Docs, users can edit together in real-time, leave suggestions and comments, and use different types of tags that facilitate collaboration between users. Google Docs also allows for easy integration with other Google tools like Gmail, which gives this collaborative software great flexibility.

Key features:

  • Commenting, chat, and real-time editing
  • Exporting your work in .docx, .pdf, .odt, .rtf, .txt, or .html format
  • Unlimited revision history
  • Sharing options
  • Access from multiple devices

Asana

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Asana is a work management platform that helps teams organize, track, and coordinate their work. It’s a powerful collaboration tool that helps teams to easily work together. The app offers numerous collaboration features, including file sharing, project and task scheduling, coordination through the assignment of dates and owners, and real-time communication capabilities.

Key features:

  • Tasks
  • Status updates
  • Time tracking
  • Inbox
  • Analytics

Trello

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Trello is a collaborative project management platform that helps companies create and manage visual workflows. With Trello, project managers and team members can easily coordinate, control, organize, and plan daily work tasks. This tool ensures that everyone knows their daily objectives, leaving no room for dilemmas or misunderstandings.

Key features:

  • Different views: Table, Calendar, Dashboard, Map, and Workspace
  • Templates
  • Automation
  • Integration
  • Plugins

Zoom

Zoom is one of the most popular conferencing tools, boasting millions of users worldwide. The app provides an easy and intuitive way for people to meet and communicate. With Zoom, users can effortlessly conduct one-on-one or group meetings, share screens for presentations, and organize meetings with participants outside their organization.

Key features:

  • Meeting recordings
  • Meeting summarization generation
  • Chat threads
  • Supports multiple languages

Notion

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Notion is a collaborative app designed to enhance productivity by offering versatile options for organizing tasks. It seamlessly integrates into any company's workflow, functioning as collaborative writing software, a knowledge base platform, a project management tool for creating projects, and even as a calendar.

Notion boasts a wide array of features; we have outlined some of the key ones below.

Key features:

  • Code snippets
  • Images & videos
  • Powerful search 
  • Drag and drop features
  • Priority labels

Stackby

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Stackby is a smart spreadsheet app that includes multiple collaboration features to facilitate teamwork among employees working together on a document. It seamlessly transitions from a spreadsheet to a relational database, making data import and template creation easy. With over 25 column data types, 6 data views, power-ups, and an app marketplace for no-code solutions and custom dashboards, Stackby is well-suited for various industries.

  • Seamless data-sharing capabilities
  • Unique column types for versatile data organization
  • Various automation features such as the In-built Data Explorer and connectivity to over 50 popular APIs
  • Advanced filtering options

Summing up 

Imagine a company has important project deadlines but they struggle because the necessary information is spread out in emails and documents. This important information is hard to access when employees need it most. This shows how important it is for companies to use collaboration tools that serve as central hubs where teams can easily talk to each other, share ideas, and work together, even if they're far apart. Choosing the right tool, such as Helpjuice can help you overcome these challenges and make crucial information available even when people work from different locations or are absent from work.