How to Adjust Your Business for Collaboration

Collaborative work is pushing organizations forward faster today than ever before. With the use of more dynamic and option-rich technology, your organization can benefit from the improved productivity that comes from enhancing your collaborative strategies. Today, we look at some of the technologies used by organizations that prioritize collaborative work.

Hardware

The first part of making adjustments is to acknowledge that you aren’t doing things with the health of your business in mind. The good news is that you likely already have much of the technology needed to create a more collaborative workplace. Ultimately, it will be on you to put in place the technology your company needs to facilitate better collaboration. What does this include? You will have to make sure that you have a strong wireless Internet setup, so establishing effective wireless access points that cover the entire floor plan may be in the cards. You will also want the capabilities available to view and share data and coordinate the management of company projects with people who are constantly on the move. You will also need to be able to secure all of it.

The largest expense, as far as hardware goes would be if you decide to make available mobile devices to your staff as productivity machines. There are ways to get powerful smartphones for a fraction of the retail cost, but you will have to buy several to have the price cut.

Software

Software may be where you will find that things get more pricey. If you are an old brick and mortar that has centralized computing resources, in order to make your organization more collaboration-minded, you will need to provide people access to the computing resources they need to get their work done. So while there are private cloud platforms available, the cost is often prohibitive for small and medium-sized businesses to roll out.

Cloud-hosted software can provide you and your staff with all the computing resources that are needed to get busy. You can choose between any number of productivity suites, communications options, and management platforms. In fact, you can find about any type of cloud-hosted software you need today. The main benefit is that with a built-in access management system, cloud software provides access to software and data from anywhere with an Internet connection, and gives administrators enough control to keep organizational networks free from threats.

Policies

In order to be a business that thrives as a result of enhanced collaboration, that business is going to have to have policies in place that make data sharing the rule, not the exception. That’s not to say that you have to preside over the swapping of social security numbers or medical charts. It’s that it has to be easy for people to get the data they need, when they need it.

This ends up being more of a benefit than a detriment. A lot of organizations like to keep a tight rein on operational decision making, and these platforms, for all the freedoms they give workers, are great for communicating a vision. Working with others has its bumps in the road, but with today’s worker being more at home communicating digitally than ever before, providing them a construct in which to use these skills for the benefit of your company is not just powerful, it’s smart.

Business communications are changing, and your business needs to change with them. If your organization is looking to expand its collaboration efforts to get projects coordinated more effectively, call the IT professionals at Washington Works today at 301-571-5040.