Modern business moves at the speed of light and employees want to feel more engaged than ever in their day-to-day work. Unfortunately, both companies and employees feel the other isn’t doing enough, as recent statistics suggest that 88% of employees don’t feel passionate about work while 79% of companies feel like they have a retention problem. Couple this with the fact that 39% of employees feel like their company does not collaborate enough, and you have a real problem.
Besides engaging employees and acknowledging them for doing a good job, businesses need to look to technology to create a more collaborative and team-driven environment. In today’s blog post, we’ll look at five reasons why businesses should look at investing in a collaboration platform for their organizational needs.
1. Team Alignment
According to HR consultancy firm ClearCompany, 97% of employees and executives surveyed feel that a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a project. With nearly total agreement, it’s clear that feeling a part of something gets everyone on the same page working towards a common goal. When emails can get lost, notes forgotten, and voicemails unreturned, there can be a disconnect that prevents everyone from being able to work well together.
2. Fresh Ideas
Collaboration also leads to fresh ideas and new opportunities. When employees are siloed, they often do not have the opportunity to interact with others, leading to limitations in innovation. In the cited ClearCompany survey above, 90% of employees surveyed also thought that decision-makers should seek out other opinions before coming to a decision – and 40% of employees thought that decision-makers failed to do so.
3. Younger Generations Support It
As Millennials become a large part of the workforce, they often state they want to do meaningful work, and often times this means teaming up with others to drive real impact. Just under half of Millennials surveyed by ClearCompany are in support of having such tools in the workforce, and 40% would even pay for a platform out of their own pocket in order to turn their wish into reality.
4. Collective Intelligence and Memory
Former HP CEO Lew Platt once said that “If HP knew what HP knows, then we would be 3 times as productive. Collective intelligence means that an organization is able to make decisions as a team and make more informed business decisions. For example, this works perfectly with product launches. With many departments coming together in this example, everyone can share their ideas for greater synergy, feedback, and collaboration. The acronym of team after all is together everyone achieves more.
5. Save Money
Ultimately since business is about maximizing value, adding collaboration does that by bringing people together but also by allowing organizations to leverage technology. Platforms like Cisco WebEx, for example, allow for organizations to save money on plane tickets and hotels by instead letting employees use video conferencing to get things done. The proliferation of cloud technologies is doing many of the same things as well.
What’s Next for You?
If you’re looking to be more collaborative in your organization, you won’t have to look far to find those technologies. At myhosting.com, we have solutions like MicrosoftSharePointwhere you can share files, collaborate with others, build platforms, and index files for later searching all at a low monthly price. If you want, then you can even build a collaborative community through bulletin board technologies like phpBB too.
What do you think? Have we convinced your organization to be more collaborative? Are you currently using collaborative technologies? Let us know and share your comments in the section below.
