Poor collaboration generates tension and can cause severe problems if you don’t handle it correctly. Miscommunication also impacts the commitment of individual employees in teamwork and affects the outcomes of work processes.
If teams do not coordinate their work, they may execute tasks multiple times, or work on assignments that are not necessary. The outcome is frustration, a drop in motivation, and delayed projects.
However, good communication isn’t as simple as getting your employees to “talk to each other” more. Many organizations suffer from too much communication and important information drowns in a sea of noise and chatter.
Clear responsibilities and trust among coworkers is vital for good collaboration and impacts the success of a business. Functioning collaboration in workplaces results in higher job satisfaction, less staff turnover, and a higher coordination level that follows the company’s mission.
Collaboration tools can help your teams improve collaboration. If you are not sure about the benefits of collaboration tools for your business, here are six ways they can positively impact your business.
1. Say goodbye to hours of information search
On average, employees spend around nine hours (Clinked, 2017) per working week collecting necessary information to achieve their tasks. They search through email, shared drives, and dozens of apps to figure out where the data is.
A collaboration tool for your business becomes the system of record for your discussions. Rather than having conversations spread out over multiple applications, you can have them all in one place.
2. Hold productive meetings
The first portion of many meetings is a status update. Rather than wasting that precious time, you can share regular status updates on a collaboration tool and then use your meeting time to discuss strategic matters.
The collaboration tool can also become a great place to post the notes and action items from the meeting.
When meetings are focused on what your team should do, instead of what you did, it is a much better use of time.
3. Always catch great ideas
Creativity often comes at random times and places. Using a collaboration tool allows you to have these conversations at any point and draw inspiration from lots of areas.
Rather than having to wait until you are in the office, or sending off an email with someone left off, a collaboration tool lets you instantly share a new idea and get feedback on it.
4. Reduce travel and office space
If you are going to hire the best talent, you probably won’t be able to have people in the same room all the time. While there’s no replacement for being in the same room together, a collaboration tool allows you to create a digital workplace that functions as a replacement for being right next to each other.
But with the ability to control your notifications, you can choose when to be distracted. Collaboration tools make it possible to allow for remote working, cut down on long commutes, and help you take advantage of office space that you don’t need to spend a fortune on.
5. Separate communication from tasks
When you use collaboration tools for your business, you can segment communication about work, and actually working on tasks into two different buckets. Communication is required for discussing projects, looking at trends, and making course corrections.
However, if you spend all of your time communicating, there will be a long list of undone tasks that move the business forward. The best collaboration tools will help you have the discussion, but then move quickly to tasks.
6. Break away from email
Email has been the de facto collaboration tool for the last two decades, but it has not aged well. Information is hard to find, everything gets dumped into a common inbox, and process approvals and discussions are co-mingled with offers, notifications, and tons of other things.
Email makes it hard to ever move forward because it’s tempting to just stay inside it, forever moving towards inbox zero while also using it as a to-do list. When you start using it as a content management system with ever-increasing attachment sizes, you’ve lost all control.
Moving forward with collaboration tools
Collaboration tools can support your company undertakings in many different ways. You need to give your team a tool that helps them communicate better, while not sucking them into a powerful vortex they can’t escape from.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but there are many collaboration tools for businesses out there and one of them will fit you perfectly.
Kissflow is unique because it pulls discussions about work beside project, process, and case management where work gets done. Start a free trial and see if Kissflow is right tool for you!
