Which business challenges can be solved with collaboration tools?
By Phil Maurer. Published 28. June 2016.
Social collaboration can be a turnkey solution for solving many of today’s business woes. First, though, you have to identify the current challenges that businesses like yours face. You have to know why these challenges exist and how to address them.
Here are three challenges that most businesses can attest as being core issues in the workplace.
Time management
Poor time management is prevalent in just about every industry. Staff that doesn’t manage their time well can mean missed deadlines and launch delays, which impacts revenue. While lack of time management starts at the individual level, it ultimately becomes an institutional problem. Often, the problem is that time isn’t being proportionately allocated.
One study, for example, indicated that the average staff member spends 15% to 25% of his working time researching and looking for information.
With the right collaboration tool, you can centralize content in a single location and organize it according to department and active projects. It’s a huge time saver when your team can retrieve information in a near instant. This means less time researching and more time dedicated to the actual execution of the project.
Communication
It’s rare for a project to go without a hitch. Preventable problems, though, are often the result of miscommunication between two or more departments. This report indicated that 86% of employees attributed communication breakdown as a major factor for workplace failures. That’s an astonishing number, to be sure.
Collaboration software fosters teamwork, no matter if team members are disbursed across the office, the street, or the globe. Instead of scattered messages via personal email, work email, social networks, and phone, members have a single tool for exchanging information in a clutter-free, spam-free environment.
In addition, collaboration software often includes video teleconferencing with a chat space for real-time communication. Some platforms also support multiple languages, which is invaluable because language barriers can lead to misinterpretation.
Mobility
Mobile communication enables all members to stay connected even when select personnel are away from their office or dispatched to a field assignment. Collaboration software also gives mobile users the same access to tools and functions as they have on desktops and laptops, giving them a new level of productivity regardless of their location.
Collaboration is key
Ultimately, collaboration software is about unifying your teams, enabling their collective know-how to be best utilized and getting barriers out of their way. That’s why collaboration software can be a big solution, even for small businesses.
