The Future of Collaboration in the Workplace
In our increasingly digital world, it often feels that communication is drifting away from face to face discussions to an over-reliance on emails, SMS and online social networks to get our message across to others. This is causing significant challenges in the professional workplace.
The world of business and collaboration is evolving. There’s clear evidence that a productive and collaborative work environment will often lead to a stronger ROI at every level of the business.
Companies need to focus on efficiency and productivity, but increasingly they also need to focus on employee satisfaction, corporate culture, and access to new technology in an effort to attract and retain the best employees and deliver great results to their clients.
What value does your firm place on collaboration in the workplace?
Anyone who has tried to engage in online communication to share ideas and thoughts at work knows how limiting technology can be in enhancing collaboration. Social networks can help, but how do we monitor the use of these tools in the workplace? In your inbox, what percentage of your emails are internal versus external communications? For most professional service firms, the percentage of internal email is far higher than we realise. Do you think this is a good thing, or are we using emails as an easy (but not necessarily effective) alternative to actually having a discussion with the people around us?
A face to face discussion allows people to share ideas and thoughts. It encourages creativity and ‘outside the square’ thinking that is increasingly important in professional firms. Whilst we would all like more discussions on issues and challenges, this is also quite difficult in a professional service environment that seems to value chargeable time above creativity and curiosity.
An evolving solution to this dilemma has been to use online collaborative tools such as ‘Slack’ [www.slack.com] and ‘Yammer’ [www.yammer.com] to effectively engage team members in discussions on key challenges, issues and solutions in an efficient way. Slack stands for ‘Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.’ It’s clear that this and other online collaborative tools have quickly found their place in the professional workplace. In just 3 years since its launch, Slack has grown to be valued at $3 billion. In 2015, Slack passed more than a million daily active users.
[Blog update 2nd Nov 2016. Microsoft has announced the launch of Microsoft Teams – A chat based workspace ‘designed to facilitate real-time collaboration while building up the institutional knowledge of the team. The application is designed to pull together various Microsoft tools into a single platform’ Click here for fuirther information.]
Online collaborative tools allow information and ideas to be shared in a way that’s flexible, engaging and not as time-dependent as a face to face meeting. These tools also provide the opportunity for people with less strong verbal communication skills to open up and share their ideas with their colleagues.
If you’re struggling to get engagement and involvement from your staff in relation to challenges and decisions, there is the opportunity to use online collaborative tools to encourage the sharing of ideas. These tools can also be used effectively for collaboration:
- All team communication is in one place, easily accessible.
- All knowledge and information is searchable from one location
- File sharing for collaboration and feedback is achieved easily
- These tools allow for both 1:1 conversations and provide group discussions
- These tools allow collaboration anytime, anywhere, reducing the need for meetings
So, the next time you or your team complain that there’s simply not enough time to engage in endless meetings or your firm’s leaders express frustration that staff are not contributing to discussions, consider replacing some meetings with virtual collaboration. If internal emails are a major issue for your firm, establish a clear policy that outlines how emails and other online collaborative tools should be used selectively to achieve greater engagement and better discussions.
Just one caution about using these tools in the professional service environment – if the leaders of your firm won’t use them, then staff are unlkely to embrace them. A key challenge at this time is that the (usually) older leaders of professional firms are often less comfortable with online communication than younger staff. That’s yet another opportunity for collaboration!
If you’d like to discuss further how to improve internal communication and collaboration in your team by using technology appropriately, just give me a call on 1300 872 792 [AUS] or +61 421 627 669 [INT]
