Improving Your Collaboration Can Improve Performance

With the exception of a sole proprietorship, a business of any size relies on its team in order to function properly. As a result, this team needs to be able to work together towards a common goal in order to succeed. To accomplish this, collaboration technologies are becoming more and more common in office environments, and generally benefit the performance of the business in its operations.

How Collaboration is Changing Industry
A survey that Oblong Industries conducted among IT professionals indicated that 91% of those surveyed feel that complex business problems could be better solved through interacting more with collected data. Collaboration takes this interaction one step further, creating an environment where ideas can be developed through the input of multiple participants in real time. Furthermore, collaborative technologies can help keep the participants of these meetings engaged and active, whether they are gathered in a single shared space or are conferencing in remotely.

In other words, the ability to use these collaborative solutions lends itself to the active implementation of teamwork, that often-desired phenomenon that boosts efficiency and the quality of the end result. As these solutions grow to be more dynamic, this boost only becomes more pronounced, leaving the companies who leverage collaborative tools in a better and better position.

How Collaboration Makes a Difference
There are quite a few ways that leveraging collaboration can improve internal business operations. Here are just a few:

Enhance Business Processes - The right collaboration platform can be used as a means to optimize the processes that a business goes through as a part of its day-to-day operations. By including collaborative technologies into the workflow, employees will be more apt to follow business procedures, and workflows can be studied and improved in order to be more effective.

Leverage All Talent - As business shifts to fully embrace the paradigm that the Internet and communicative collaboration allows, it will become easier to utilize talent from outside of a core organization. The use of freelancers and private contractors will be more enabled through collaborative crowdsourcing, and communications will be more easily established between company employees, vendors, partners, and external talent. If reliable and efficient collaborative habits are established between these groups, the entire system could see benefits.

Results-Driven Results - Of course, there’s wisdom in the old adage, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Simply providing the technology will not be enough to establish overarching collaborative habits. Instead, workforces will need to be motivated by management to adopt these solutions until they see the positive results for themselves. Small incentives for leveraging these solutions can be an effective means of doing so.

Ready to Deploy Collaborative Tools?
If you’re ready to leverage collaboration for your business’ benefit - or you just want more information - reach out to the professionals at Washington Works. Give us a call at 301-571-5040.