Although the COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on businesses worldwide, research indicates that most organizations have experienced little to no loss of productivity. It is hard to imagine how this would have been possible before the emergence of today’s robust team collaboration solutions.
According to a recent CNBC poll, 88 percent of companies say their productivity has increased or remained steady since the pandemic began. These are extraordinary results given the obvious technical, logistical and personal challenges involved in the abrupt shift to work-from-home operations.
Collaboration solutions that combine voice, video, chat and file-sharing capabilities have played a huge role by allowing disconnected team members to come together on a common platform to share ideas, solve problems and accomplish tasks. They also support key business processes such as project management, scheduling, team training and new-hire onboarding, and include analytics capabilities for creating insights about team interactions. McKinsey Research says collaboration tools can improve productivity by up to 30 percent.
These tools also provide a hedge against employee isolation. A recent Stanford University study found that remote employees who can collaborate with colleagues report higher levels of engagement and success and lower levels of fatigue than those working individually on the same task. Conversely, 97 percent of corporate executives surveyed by Salesforce said that a lack of team collaboration negatively impacts performance. Eighty-six percent said they had personally worked on projects that failed due to poor collaboration and communication.
These benefits would have been unattainable for most organizations just a few years ago when old-fashioned conference calls and janky video conferences represented the best collaborative experience most people could get. Recurring technical issues with bandwidth constraints, garbled audio and frozen video would have made it nearly impossible to engage a large remote workforce.
In the first days of the lockdown orders that sent people home to work, many companies rapidly adopted cloud-based collaboration solutions. With it now apparent that remote work is going to be standard operating procedure for quite some time, it may be time to consider a more robust, business-grade solution.
If you are in the process of evaluating team collaboration solutions, here are three essential characteristics to consider:
- Ease of use. The app should have an intuitive interface that makes it easy to open and use. Users should be able to access voice, conferencing, instant messaging and more without separate logins, dial-ins or passcodes. They should be able to instantly share notes, calendar events and schedule tasks with a few clicks.
- Versatility. Remote users need to access files and data from anywhere on any device. Your collaboration app should work seamlessly with both mobile devices and your organization’s phone system.
- Security. Because employees may save files to their mobile devices, encryption and data loss prevention features are needed to ensure that private data remains private. Content filtering provides additional protection by scanning web applications, identifying malware signatures, and examining instant messaging and email to protect against data leakage. They can also enforce access policies on remote and mobile devices that are used outside the network.
Converge can help you evaluate, acquire and implement collaboration solutions that meet your remote work requirements. In cooperation with our technology partners, we are offering special Work From Home solution packages featuring collaboration tools, remote access technologies and training programs. Give us a call to learn more about our offerings and how we can help keep your remote workers engaged and productive.
Revision: It’s imperative that you evaluate, acquire and implement collaboration solutions that meet your remote work requirements, and that you find the best Work From Home solution packages featuring collaboration tools, remote access technologies and training programs.
Give us a call to learn more about our offerings and how we can help keep your remote workers engaged and productive.
