Collaboration tools are not just for the office anymore. Businesses need to keep up with an ever-changing market that can be driven by technology, so using collaboration tools to better connect your team is crucial. Collaboration tools give you the ability to communicate more efficiently, work remotely, brainstorm new ideas, and track projects. Investing in the implementation of collaboration tools will allow your business to realize long-term benefits, increase productivity and performance, and promote better working relationships among colleagues.
Do you want to increase the productivity of your business? By increasing the amount of collaboration tools available to use in your business, you will be able to work with your team better and accomplish more. This article will discuss how to find the right collaboration tools for your business.
You receive too many emails
Is your mailbox full? Did you receive the same file in 5 different versions? So of course, you don’t know which one is the one you need!
23% of workers think emails harm their productivity, moreover, the time spent to manage them constitutes 28% of total work time.
Emails have revolutionized communication (whether personal or professional) and have facilitated many exchanges, however using a chat tool which is divided into projects is way more practical.
There’s no need to write again and again ‘Hello’, ‘Best Regards’ and so on at each and every email you write. With a chat tool, you can talk to your colleagues, suppliers, and clients as if it was a Facebook conversation or a text conversation, with more short and immediate messages. You can also often add emojis, gifs, pictures, files and so on.
You are a little lost about your team projects’ progress
Who does what? How much have we progressed? Are the prioritised tasks complete? Are there some problems with the projects? Are the deadlines fast approaching? The more people there are working on a project, the more difficult it is to follow the project’s evolution from all involved workers. Collaborative tools can be very useful for that problem because you can easily follow the project step by step, who does what and so on. This is especially so with a tool which includes tasks management.
Sharing documents has become a puzzle
Knowing which version of a document is the last one and being sure about the safety of shared documents can easily become challenges. A cloud tool enables you to have access to all documents from anywhere and to be always updated.
You want to increase your team’s productivity
Collaborative tools allow you to gain time, they make you avoid useless tasks and they make you see clearer the projects’ progress in a simple way.
Increased security
If you handle sensitive data as part of your job, you’ll know the severe consequences of a data breach.
Emails can accidentally be sent to the wrong person, leaving your organisation vulnerable.
An online collaboration tool gives you total control over who sees your data. You can set permissions, only allowing certain individuals or teams to view a document or a series of documents.
Leading vendors also put strict security measures in place to ensure that the software can’t be hacked.
Reduce the number of tools you use
You’ll no doubt have a long list of tools that you use on a daily basis.
You might use Excel to record holiday requests; a survey tool such as Survey Monkey to interview key stakeholders, a productivity app like Todoist to manage your tasks – the list goes on.
Wouldn’t it be better to have everything in one place? With a collaboration tool, you can then use just one login and access a wide range of tools and data at your fingertips. No need to remember a million different passwords either!
Increase productivity
You would hope so right? There is no point implementing a collaboration tool if it’s not going to increase productivity.
Luckily, they do. Research has found that these tools can improve team efficiency by 20%, which in turn leads to more effective collaboration in the workplace.
One key reason for this is that your stakeholders can access all of the information they need easily, in one place.
This can help cut down the time that they spend searching for documents.
Statistics suggest that employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information.
With this reduced, your colleagues can spend more time being productive and less time on boring, admin related tasks.
Meeting Project Timelines
Project managers cringe when they imagine missing critical milestones due to communication issues. As a project manager, you can mitigate this risk with the right project collaboration tool.
What is the next milestone? Are there impediments that are getting in the way of reaching that milestone? With visual project management, everyone can see a clear picture of the priorities and status of work. Plus, updates can be viewed in real time, so the project manager can easily adapt the project plan as new information becomes available.
Reducing Work-Related Stress
As a project manager, what keeps you up at night? Not knowing if the critical path will be met in time? Uncertainty over whether a team member will follow through? Fear of missing something that was right under your nose?
You have all the information you need in your project documentation, but tracking that information is another thing entirely. Project managers must take the time every day to check up on status, ensure communication is taking place where needed, and manage the expectations of stakeholders. These three things consume so much of a project manager’s time that most project managers have turned to project management software as a solution.
Managing projects will never be easy, but project managers can take some of the complexity out of project management by choosing a visual, versus list-based, project collaboration tool that will facilitate communication, empower accountability, and reduce the burden on the project manager.
A little healthy competition
When you’re working closely with your peers on projects, all of your work is on display for the rest of your team – and members of other teams – to see. That’s where collaborative tools add transparency and visibility to the workflow: teams oversee the progress of their projects, review each other’s work and provide help and feedback that benefit the project and the business as a whole. Not only is the success of the project on the line, so is the opinion of your colleagues.
Cross-team collaboration
Your marketing team won’t always align well with your finance team because of the simple fact that they don’t cross over a lot, so they don’t need to spend a lot of time together. Thanks to collaboration tools that can be used across your entire business, your teams can work seamlessly with each other without disrupting their workday. If the finance team can keep on top of how the marketing team is using their budget day by day or week by week, they can have better insight into how business growth is created by the various teams and allocate budget in a better-informed way.
The Need to Improve Efficiency
All businesses would like to be more efficient. But sometimes, efficiency can be impeded by something as simple as how an organization stores information. Employees often rely on different storage channels to obtain information. In many cases, they will need to switch between several different tools, including legacy technology, to access relevant information over the course of a project. Because the information is disjointed and piecemeal, team members waste precious time attempting to organize and consolidate information instead of moving the project forward.
Employees need a collaboration tool capable of consolidating different resources into a unified workspace. By implementing one single source for all employee needs, organizations avoid losing hours spent searching for relevant documents and information, speeding up work and making collaborations easier. Centralized digital workspaces can also host reference and onboarding guides, which saves time when updating up new members on protocol.
The Absence of Centralized Internal Communication
According to a recent study, while 99% of surveyed employees preferred to work in a place that discusses issues truthfully and effectively, less than half thought their companies measured up. A lot of these collaboration and communication mishaps are caused by teams relying on multiple disparate platforms such as email, Slack, and Google Hangouts for communication. But when access to important information spans different platforms, it is easy for messages to get lost and for employees to miss key updates.
Employees cannot perform to the best of their ability if they rely on disjointed, incomplete communications and are forced to piece together the big picture themselves. Companies need a centralized solution that logs important conversations and organizes communications in one accessible place for future reference. Collaboration tools that enable seamless, transparent communication and easy-to-use search functions can improve internal communication and employee satisfaction — not to mention compliance.
Conclusion
Collaboration tools are facilitating better connections between you and your client, boss, coworker. This in turn is helping to increase productivity, enhance workflow, and be more efficient. Using ways in which to collaborate helps improve the experience for everyone in the process. Whether it’s a face-to-face meeting or even communicating through emails, collaboration tools are being used because they are working within the business world to make everything easier when it comes to communication, workflow, and tasks.