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When thinking about the obstacles that may derail or delay a project, team communication probably isn’t one of the critical barriers that first comes to mind. Yet that’s precisely why many projects fail — because members of one department can’t fully understand or integrate with members of another.
A non-furtive solution to this issue is an enterprise collaboration platform (ECP). These solutions are a system that includes any tools and processes that employees can use to connect and collaborate for any given project. An ECP generally provides email, web conferencing, social media, video, document sharing, instant messaging, instant chat, and more. These platforms can boost the effectiveness of the working process and add profitability while changing the way organizations operate.
The benefits of ECPs are plentiful, as mentioned above, but, more tangibly, can include several other benefits, such as:
One primary reason to adopt ECP platforms is because your teams likely want to work on such platforms. One survey reports that as many as 95% of employees in large enterprises are currently using enterprise collaboration software because they increase productivity and boost most team member’s effectiveness. Especially important for those organizations with employees scattered around in various geographic regions and time zones – and in the time of COVID-19.
Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, announced more than 13 million people use Teams daily, and more than 19 million people use it weekly. The platform is designed for collaboration and communication. Organizations that communicate effectively are nearly five times more likely to retain the best teams.
In our new reality – where we’re sequestered in remote offices working as part of disparate teams – the ability to communicate effectively with one another as if we are sitting next to each other is critical. This is where the benefit of collaboration platforms is found.
While it might be challenging to show how ECP platforms increase organizational profitability, some examples illustrate the benefits collaboration can lead to. Quickly and effectively communicating with contacts without multiple plug-ins needed to facilitate the transmission of ideas can lead to better, more user-friendly outcomes for all involved.
Recent Salesforce research shows that more than 30% of consumers prefer receiving a text message compared with a phone call. In the spirit of enterprise collaboration, developing an application that sends texts to contacts can deliver information to clients in a manner they want to receive.
My team recently developed an integrated app offering inbound and outbound messages and other relevant features into an organization’s portal. We needed to address creating better collaboration between all teams – meaning quicker and seamless communication with all team members. Ultimately, the project came down to a lack of alignment.
Within a team, lack of organizational alignment impacts all outcomes and goals. Also, lack of transparency about how decisions are made creates stumbling blocks. Alignment requires leadership. You must define project goals before taking action. Your teams need to know that the person who makes the decisions is responsible for their consequences. Transparent decisions minimize resistance to the decisions. With clear communication –- or through communication — people must be able to understand how leaders make decisions, and who makes the decisions – which are facilitated through enterprise collaboration solutions.
Our team also recently worked with a pharmaceutical research organization. It required data fields within its communication portal so teams could upload and update information across the multi-site platform. The client’s team was unable to upload and edit data critical to mission goals; the system lacked intuitiveness. The organization’s users couldn’t understand how best to use the platform or why they should use it. Once changes were engineered with the technology — data stability and better communication across sites and team silos — users found they were more valuable to those being served.
By using an enterprise collaboration solution, organizations can improve their communication cultures and their operations because goals quickly become aligned. ECP also create transparency of processes and lead to better overall team collaboration — just a few of the benefits of ECP.
Ultimately, no matter the enterprise collaboration system utilized, these solutions will continue to evolve. No matter, when considering a new platform, determine how the solutions is likely to evolve and why, and how agile the vendor providing the solutions is to adjusting to changing technology conditions.
Other proper integration processes include:
Team communications is the primary barrier to effective and efficient collaboration across most enterprises. As discussed here, it’s precisely why many projects fail. Without communication, silos form or continue to thrive, and cross-functional teams become anything but.
Collaboration systems help collate processes and individuals in a communicative network where individuals with specific goals and needs can connect and collaborate for any or all projects, small or large. Enterprise collaboration platforms bring the best communication tools together to more than boost the effectiveness of a number of channels, adding profitability and dramatically impacting how the highest functioning organizations operate.
NIX has a large experience in developing enterprise collaboration software for companies of any size. Contact us today if you consider implementing this for your business, we would be happy to help.
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