Remove the Barriers to Collaboration

Time is of the essence in today’s workplace. To keep pace, workers need quick and easy access to colleagues to chat, share content, conference, video and more.

Make your employees’ lives easier

Collaboration is a critical component of a successful company culture. From getting work done to meeting deadlines and exceeding expectations, getting ahold of colleagues and moving a project forward is important. The goal is to make employees’ lives easier. Collaborating in a group by its very nature makes employees’ lives easier and creates new insights that may advance the ideas associated with the project at hand. In the end, collaborating not only gets the work done well but also creates a sense of personal fulfillment.

Collaboration keys to success

Working in a collaborative environment, however, has its challenges. According to a Harvard Business Review article, some of the most valuable team members can become bottlenecks if their time isn’t used wisely. Both individuals and teams need to collaborate to move the business forward, and key performers must be part of those collaborative sessions. But the keys to success in removing barriers to collaboration lies in the following:

• Ease of use
• Accessibility
• Efficiency of collaboration tools

Effective business communication is a two-way street

The challenge with some collaboration tools, like WebEx and GoToMeeting, for example, is that they are primarily designed as tools for one-way communications. Rather than being truly collaborative, webinar style meetings deliver presentation material to an audience, and provide only basic tools for feedback in the form of chat, polls, and quizzes. No one uses WebEx or GotToMeeting to do quick chats, ad hoc sharing sessions, or spontaneous video conferences.

An effective collaboration tool, like Unified Communications, should integrate into the flow of work, and be easily and quickly accessible to end-users. It should literally be an extension of the user’s business phone number, chat environment, and video conferencing experience so collaboration flows naturally from other communication experiences. The best path to collaboration is choosing a tool that people enjoy using, and that ultimately helps the team with one of the most important assets for the business — time.

Sources: Broadsoft, Harvard Business Review, Nutcache