In recent years, the word "collaboration" has been thrown around more than ever before, especially in marketing and other, similar areas of the professional sector. Collaboration tools are indeed one of the most important aspects of any successful business strategy, and the fact is, collaboration means something different for every organization. This depends heavily upon products and services rendered, overarching goals, and more. At its core, collaboration occurs when two or more members of a team work together to solve problems and achieve a common goal.
If you want your business to get the most out of collaboration tools, consider the reasons why you want to introduce collaboration in the first place. There are many benefits that come along with collaboration when successfully pulled-off, including the following:
As you might expect, there are a few different levels of collaboration, each of which has unique effects on your business. Learning how to collaborate effectively is all about understanding how to go about the process. While there are countless "sub-levels" of organization to consider, it can be helpful to internalize aspects of the three most common options.
Take a look at how modern professionals conduct business today in comparison to just a decade ago, and it’s clear just how much has changed.
In the past, collaborating with others on a project typically meant being in the same room as everyone else. While in-person collaboration tools certainly have their advantages, they come with logistical issues that often make things more difficult than is necessary, especially for companies who work with remote employees.
Today's solution to this issue is known as online collaboration tools, and they're one of the biggest game-changers to come along in years.
To put it simply...
Online collaboration is a collection of processes and tools that allow colleagues to interact with each other (as well as with partners and customers) via web-based systems to share information and work towards a common goal.
Online collaboration tools for business are one of the best ways for companies with remote employees to streamline workflow, and it's catching on rather quickly in the business community at large.
Effective at improving efficiency, productivity, and innovation, online collaboration combines aspects of social media, traditional business, and crowdsourcing to create an experience unlike anything else.
If online collaboration is catching on for any reason, it's because of the business benefits in many different industries.
For one, it allows remote workers to communicate and work together in a streamlined manner. This not only improves efficiency, but also lets employees get to know each other, work in harmony, and build relationships.
Online collaboration is progressive in nature, making it an ideal platform for forward-thinking businesses.
It fosters the creation of ideas that might not otherwise come to fruition, nips potential issues in the bud, and generally creates a more enjoyable, stress-free work environment.
For businesses that operate outside of a centralized location, online collaboration tools are a dream come true.
As you might expect, online collaboration relies on a variety of factors to work at peak performance. While there are many viewpoints on what goes into effective online collaboration, it's helpful to look at things in terms of three crucial elements — people, processes, and technology.
The first, most crucial element of online collaboration to take into consideration is people. Without people, the entire concept of online collaboration would fall apart on every level. The people involved in a particular project are the true source of innovation, fueling collaboration with ideas and knowledge.
There are a few constants associated with this particular element. Among the greater category of people, it's typical for the following pieces of the puzzle to be in place —
Process, the second element of online collaboration, is a bit less tangible than the first, but not exactly more difficult to understand. In many ways, process describes workflow, taking into consideration everything that comes with working in a socially collaborative environment. In general, those who are used to a typical business model will have to change their process slightly to facilitate collaboration, especially when the majority of which is done online.
When adjusting one's process, there are a few things that need to be kept in mind. Hitting on all of the following will ensure that you're getting the most out of online collaboration, all the while not having to think too hard about it —
The third and final element of online collaboration is technology. One thing that often gets overlooked is the importance of technology to modern collaboration. Without it, collaborating with colleagues on the other side of the planet would be next to impossible. Online collaboration tools can be a bit daunting at first, but if you’ve ever used a social media network, you'll likely have no difficulty diving in.
There are a few different technological platforms that can foster online collaboration, including —
Collaboration has always served an important role in professional settings. In the past, employees were typically required to work within the same office in order to collaborate. Phone and email certainly made things easier for remote employees, but these were not enough. As technology progressed, a more effective group of solutions quickly made its way to the forefront — social intranet software with online collaboration tools.
Social intranet software comes in a variety of different shapes and sizes, but the cornerstone of just about every option is increased collaboration abilities. With a social intranet’s online collaboration tools on your side, you can ensure that everyone on your team is able to work together without running into various boundaries, even if they're located across the world. While no two social intranet software platforms are exactly alike, there are a number of common features that are standard among most, including:
The big question today is, ‘are you ready for online collaboration tools?' The adoption and widespread use of collaboration tools as part of the sales funnel is well documented. For larger companies, these platforms are helping save millions of dollars in improved productivity and efficiency. Online collaboration tools are also a growing need for many small businesses.
How though can you tell if your business is ready for online collaboration tools?
Here are 5 telltale signs.
It takes approximately 3 years for a business to be considered socially optimized. This means a 3-year journey is essential before your business is capable of measuring the impact of social from the time you start using social media services like Facebook. If your business has been actively monitoring re-tweets, Likes, Shares and other social metrics across the web this long, you are likely familiar with the whole social business culture.
To gain even more business value with social, online collaboration tools offer to take the game to a whole new level. Familiar features like activity streams, real-time messaging, and collaboration workspaces are now integrated with your CRM, ERP, and other systems already in place.
Introducing social into existing business systems improves efficiency since it gets employees involved and enthusiast.
Faced with the decision of whether to maintain independent standalone applications or integrate all the systems together, most businesses opt to go with the second option. It saves time, resources, and dramatically improves speed of delivery.
If you are in the knowledge business, the need for aggregating files, folders, and archives has never been as challenging as it is today. Every day, your archive of valuable information increases and the need to locate it whenever the need arises helps your business remain competitive. Chat apps, wikis, blogs, and discussion forums are a valuable knowledge base and most employees use them to store literally everything they need.
Being able to search content authored by the internal team is key to improving productivity. Online collaboration tools are well-suited to deliver this capability.
At a time when innovative companies are challenging paradigms that have existed for decades, you can’t afford to play the catch-up game. Encouraging innovation from within is one way to stay ahead of the pack. For innovation to take place, you need a platform that encourages idea sharing and online collaboration tools are key to achieving this.
Most companies have decades of experience tucked away among workers. Some of these workers may have been with the company for years or decades. Their experience and knowledge is invaluable in helping you craft the next phase of your business. How do you tap into this vast resource of knowledge and encourage the sharing of ideas?
Social platforms where employees engage and interact can help monitor, collect, and act on conversations taking place across a company intranet.
Experienced employees know what customer care tactics work, what competitors are doing, and what has worked in the past... or potential ideas that could transform a company. This knowledge cannot be collected in board rooms. It takes time and requires continuous engagement before they can feel free to express their ideas and views.
Most young employees are highly disloyal and will jump ship as soon as they get bored or a bigger, better deal falls on their laps. Despite all the perks you may provide, employee turnover, especially among the young, remains high.
Could online collaboration tools help cut down your turnover rate?
With so many young people spending massive amounts of time on social networks, they are well familiar with these platforms and enjoy interacting and engaging with others. Imagine bringing the same kind of interaction and engagement into the workplace. While it is not a guarantee that social intranet software like Communifire could potentially reduce employee turnover, there is also a high chance that it could encourage sharing and interactions, all of which ultimately boost job satisfaction.
A lack of employee engagement has also been shown to contribute to a high churn rate. An engagement environment helps employees develop job satisfaction, it offers recognition for one's contributions, and provides an opportunity to perform under challenging work. A proactive approach such as introducing social intranet software with online collaboration tools into the workplace will encourage users to engage and collaborate.
Balancing the elements of a project can be challenging. Time, money, scope, and people need to be properly monitored and controlled for projects to be completed successfully. When working with teams, team members may not always have the needed competencies and access to information. A lack of accountability can result in finger-pointing and blame which are all unproductive. Poor communication may also result in project failure in some cases.
The collaboration tools found in Communifire can greatly enhance a project's speed of delivery and communication.
You can keep and monitor all your documents, tasks, and conversations together and have everyone on the same page with activity stream updates. Sharing is also much more seamless, and locating information from blogs, forums, wikis has never been easier.
For the most part, the concept of online collaboration makes perfect sense. Implementing it into a business that hasn't used it in the past, however, sometimes comes along with an adjustment period.
If you're able to internalize the following tips, you should be able to get on track with minimal interruption should a problem occur -
Online collaboration can be a complex concept, involving a variety of different aspects that can take a while to understand fully. When properly used, however, it can be a beautiful thing. If you're aware of the elements that make online collaboration what it is, you're one step closer to getting the most out of it.
At this point, it should be clear just how much your business can benefit from focusing on collaboration tools. Even if you have the best social intranet software, the right mindset, and a talented group of employees on your side, online collaboration is not without its struggles. There are plenty of ways you can improve collaboration within your organization. Here are a few examples:
As time progresses and technology continues to influence the modern business landscape, online collaboration tools will only increase in both popularity and necessity. Get started now, and you won't have to worry about your organization falling behind.
There is no doubt that public social network platforms have created a collaborative culture. People now feel the need and understand the value of online collaboration in everything they do.
On the good side, this has given birth to social intranet software with collaboration tools, as employees and customers demand the same experience at work.
On the flip side, some organizations have adopted public facing platforms like Facebook for internal collaboration, challenging IT demands for privacy, security, and compliance.
The decision of whether to adopt a collaborative intranet platform or a public platform (like Facebook) is of concern especially when an organization is limited by finances, time, and skill sets. While public platforms generally come with little to no overhead costs, are easy to implement, and pervasive, an intranet solution is built for true collaboration and goes beyond the basic online collaboration offered by public social networks.
Most public social network platforms like Facebook are built with one thing in mind: to onboard as many people as possible and make money through advertising.
The idea is to share everything with everybody and only restrict when absolutely necessary. As a result, any privacy settings on such platforms are set up with the assumption that users want to share everything with the world.
The issue of privacy across social networks has been well documented. Accidental sharing and the risks of information being shared with advertisers are very real on such platforms. Privacy terms keep on being reviewed to fit the networks' advertising models. For organizations handling client information, the issue of compliance also comes into play. It is much more difficult to implement SLAs when communication is done across social networks than within a firewalled platform.
Intranet software is built to provide a social layer between employees and the business. It is more versatile and includes a variety of online collaboration tools tools like instant messaging, document management, calendars, task management, and more. These platforms impact business in a number of ways by changing employee behavior.
Think of the improved engagement with partners and consumers that a dedicated platform affords your business. Intranet software makes it much easier to mobilize experts and stakeholders with the ability to customize and personalize public relations messages. The ability to integrate your ERP and CRM into your collaboration platforms will increase productivity dramatically rather than having to work with siloed systems that offer little value as standalones.
Transforming a company culture and improving specific business processes strategically is also much easier when you have a firewalled social system in place. A social approach in the workplace can help break down bureaucracy and hierarchy that hinder progress. Employees feel empowered when they are able to take action. All this is achievable when companies approach social networks as a way to build relationships in the workplace and not as a technology trend.
The proliferation of personal devices and different means of communications has created a new breed of users, employees, and customers with new expectations. The demand for flexible work patterns has demanded innovative approaches to improving workplace productivity.
Employees' expectations are now a notch higher than a decade or even five years ago. They now own a range of devices with powerful applications. They expect their work and home environments to be more seamless.
Customer expectations have changed dramatically as well. They want more personalized services and they want them now. Providing instant responses to customer queries is one of the main things helping organizations stay competitive. While public platforms no doubt enable quick responses, queries quickly become unmanageable when you have to respond to an ever growing list of customers, employees, and partners.
Personalizing or customizing a public social network like Facebook is difficult ... ahem ... impossible. As a mass consumer product, there is little you can do in how you organize your documents and how you interact with your coworkers and teams. Search capabilities are thinly spread, and tracking down conversations becomes a headache when you have to go back to a conversation you had months or years ago. These platforms are great when you have an instant need to connect, but fail hard when you need a document management system that keeps an organized archive of your activity.
Employee engagement has always been a hard nut to crack. While social media may often be considered the marketing department's foster child, it affects the entire organization and has the potential to deliver immediate solutions when implemented right. The familiarity of Twitter and Facebook makes social intranet software with collaboration tools friendly and easy to use. These platforms are also significant to how employees learn and interact.
Placing an ROI on adoption and user engagement is difficult and challenging, but the productivity rewards are very real. The true potential of online collaboration tools is yet to be fully realized as the question of whether an intranet solution is better than a public platform continues to perplex many organizations.
For brands and businesses, everything starts with investing in an employee culture that embodies the organization's vision and social intranet software is well positioned to do exactly that.
Online collaboration tools transform work from being a place to being about access. With a computer and a browser, including mobile devices like the iPad, you are still plugged in and are able to receive and post updates.
Your business has likely started to feel the pressure from social media. Employees may subtly demand collaboration tools in the workplace. It's just a matter of time before your needs and demands cross paths. The online collaboration tools in social intranet software are well positioned to meet the needs of both worlds and get to the next phase of workplace collaboration.
Tim is president and co-founder of Axero Solutions, a leading intranet software vendor. He's also a bestselling author of Who the Hell Wants to Work for You? Mastering Employee Engagement. Tim’s been featured in Fortune, Forbes, TIME, Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur, CNBC, Today, and other leading publications.
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