Researchers estimate that 22% of the American workforce will work remotely by 2025. The ongoing shift to remote work that we've experienced ever since the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many benefits to employees and employers alike. 

However, working with remote teams also presents several new challenges for HR leaders.

One of the more pressing challenges associated with remote collaboration is team communication. When managers and their teams never meet face-to-face, communication, collaboration, and team bonding become more difficult. The fact that 72% of employees are frustrated with traditional digital communication tools only amplifies this challenge.

Empowering your employees with the right remote communication tools is a critical component of a successful HR comms strategy. In this article, we'll showcase 10 innovative communication tools that are changing the game for remote companies. 

Why communication tools are essential for remote companies

The innovative communication tools available today are what make remote work possible. Without them, asynchronous communication between remote employees isn't feasible. Particularly with distributed organizations where team members work in different time zones, team members are forced to rely on small windows of overlapping time they have available for discussing things synchronously.

The right communication tools also help companies solve some of the unexpected challenges of remote work. From providing constructive feedback to responding to a crisis, communication tools can help facilitate essential communication that often goes overlooked in a remote work environment.

Great communication is also the foundation of company culture, and this is true whether your organization has in-office, hybrid, or fully remote employees. With communication tools designed to reinforce culture and values, you can better immerse your remote workers in a culture designed to bring the best out of them.

Of course, finding the right communication tools for your needs is often a process in itself. You may not get it right the first time but keep experimenting and listening to employees to find what works in your unique context. 

Not sure where to start? Read on for 10 of the most innovative remote employee communication tools available today.

1) Pyn

Pyn is an employee messaging and employee journey mapping platform that makes it easy to provide remote employees with timely, personalized support. 

With Pyn, you can map out every phase of the employee journey from an employee's first week to the end of their time with your company. Pyn then allows you to support employees through the key touchpoints and milestones in this journey via personalized messaging that is sent out automatically thanks to Pyn's innovative software that integrates with your HRIS.

This ability to communicate with employees at scale without sacrificing personalization makes Pyn a revolutionary tool for any fast-growth tech company that employs a high volume of remote workers. 

Start using Pyn to personalize employee communication and free up your staff to focus on other strategic tasks — schedule a demo!

Key features and capabilities

• Offers hundreds of employee message templates for streamlining a wide range of processes
• Includes behavioral nudges designed to help scale company culture and values
• Leverages HRIS data to send messages that are automated yet personalized
• Facilitates pre-onboarding communications and a 90-day onboarding journey for new hires

2) Google Suite

Google Suite (also known as G Suite and Google Workplace) is a suite of collaboration and productivity apps that offers numerous useful tools for companies managing remote workers. This includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Chat, Google Slides, Google Meet, and Google Sheets. 

From keeping updated and on schedule via Google Calendar to providing a convenient way for remote employees to communicate with each other via Google chat, the apps included in Google Suite provide numerous capabilities that are ideally suited for remote teams. 

With plans starting as low as $6 per user per month, Google Suite's pricing is affordable for small businesses and large organizations alike.

Key features and capabilities

• Video conferencing via Google Meet
• Instant messaging via Google Chat
• File sharing and document management via Google Drive and Google Docs
• Convenient scheduling and time management via Google Calendar

3) Slack

Slack is a well-known team communication platform that allows organizations to segment employee conversations into channels based on their members and topics. This makes it easy to organize communications and collaborative projects and ensures that team members can easily find the exact information they are looking for. 

Along with the ability to create unlimited channels for better organizing employee conversations, Slack also offers features such as voice and video calls, customizable notifications, instant messaging, and the ability to create public and private channels. 

Best of all, Slack is a platform many of your employees are likely already familiar with, reducing the learning curve that Slack would otherwise require.

Key features and capabilities

• Instant messaging for convenient communication between employees
• Voice and video call "huddles"
• Customizable reminders and notifications for keeping employees updated and on-schedule
• Highly customizable channels, including the ability to customize a channel's privacy settings

4) Zoom

When employees can't meet in person, the next best alternative is hosting team meetings via video call. This is why 48% of business professionals use video conferencing more frequently now than they did two years ago.

There's a good reason why Zoom has grown to become one of the most popular video conferencing tools available today. With Zoom, you can schedule and host high-quality and reliable video calls that are easy for team members to join. Once you're in a meeting, features such as team chat, an online whiteboard, live call transcription, and translated captions combine to make for a capable, feature-rich video conferencing solution.

Key features and capabilities

• Live call transcription for saving a written record of your Zoom meetings
• Translated captions to eliminate language barriers
• Shareable online whiteboards for improving brainstorming during team meetings
• Integrations with Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Google Workspace, and a wide range of other tools and apps

5) Groupmap

Groupmap is a real-time online brainstorming tool designed to foster better creativity and collaboration between remote team members. With Groupmap, you can choose from 80 templates designed to help you structure your team meetings with specific goals in mind. 

Groupmap also includes tools that allow team members to share ideas anonymously to eliminate peer pressure and encourage unrestrained brainstorming. Once an idea is shared, meeting members can vote, rate, score, like, or dislike the idea for instant feedback.

Key features and capabilities

• 80+ meeting templates to choose from
• Customizable anonymity settings for eliminating peer pressure and social anxieties
• Polls and surveys for easily collecting feedback during a meeting
• Allows employees to add images, files, links, and GIFs to the ideas that they submit

6) Microsoft Teams

With Microsoft Teams, you can look forward to video conferencing software for clear and reliable video calls, tools for streamlined file sharing, and channels for organizing team communication. Microsoft Teams also allows remote employees to communicate with each other via live chat.

While Microsoft Teams might not offer quite as many features as Zoom, it's free to use for Microsoft Office 365 subscribers. This makes Microsoft Teams a great video conferencing solution for organizations already using other Microsoft Office products.

Key features and capabilities

• Direct messaging via live chat
• High-quality, reliable conference calls
• Channels for organizing team communication
• Secure and streamlined file sharing

7) Notion

Notion allows you to create a centralized workplace perfectly suited for remote team collaboration. With Notion, organizations can build wikis that serve as knowledge bases and make it easy for employees to find the information they need. 

Notion Docs make cataloging and organizing shared documents easy, and project management tools streamline project workflows and facilitate improved task management. By consolidating numerous collaboration tools into a single platform, Notion is an all-in-one solution for remote teams that makes teamwork and collaboration much easier.

Key features and capabilities

• Customizable blocks and templates for building a wide variety of virtual workspaces
• Notion Bookmarks for improved organization
• A high-quality mobile app for iOS and Android devices

8) Gatheround

Providing your team members with bonding opportunities and chances to socialize outside the confines of work can be highly beneficial in promoting better teamwork and employee engagement. However, providing these opportunities can be especially challenging when you're working with remote employees.

This is where Gatheround can help. With Gatheround, organizations can host virtual team bonding activities such as 1:1 conversations between employees, team-building games, employee check-ins, online photo booths, and many more. These activities create beneficial bonds between remote team members and help eliminate the social isolation that remote workers often feel.

Key features and capabilities

• Dozens of activity templates to choose from
• Allows you to create a custom, recurring schedule for team-bonding activities
• Customizable prompt cards for guiding team discussions

9) Workvivo

Workvivo is an internal communication tool and employee experience management platform that provides numerous tools to help organizations communicate with their remote employees. 

With Workvivo, you can build a customized intranet social network for your company that only authorized employees can access. Workvivo then lets you post live streams, videos, news articles, and podcasts to the network to communicate any number of important messages to your employees. Employees can comment, like, and interact with these posts or create their own posts (with the right permissions). 

Along with serving as your organization's private social network, Workvivo also offers tools such as surveys and polls to collect valuable feedback from remote workers and measure their morale.

Key features and capabilities

• Feed personalization for maximum engagement
• Customizable push notifications to ensure that important updates are seen by everyone
• Community spaces for segmenting posts based on topic and enabling employees to collaborate on common interests
• Detailed analytics provide insights into employee sentiment and engagement

10) Jira

Jira is a project management software designed specifically for software development teams in fast-paced tech organizations. With Jira, development teams can streamline the process of developing new software products thanks to ready-made project templates. 

Jira also offers features such as roadmaps for improved project visibility and better organization, automated project insights for tracking progress and productivity, and boards for breaking down large, complex projects into manageable workflows.

Key features and capabilities

• Scrum, Kanban, bug tracking, and DevOps project templates
• A library of 3,000+ apps and integrations
• Boards for organizing software development projects into individual workflows
• Project roadmaps for visualizing progress

Enhance your remote work environment with Pyn

The remote work model can present some serious challenges regarding employee communication. The good news is that the right remote work tools can go a long way toward solving these challenges. 

If you want to enhance your remote work environment via personalized employee messaging and journey mapping, Pyn can help! To see why Pyn's powerful employee communication platform is the perfect choice for modern remote companies, sign up for a free Pyn demo today!