5 Benefits of Better Collaboration for Businesses

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Who doesn’t want better collaboration? It’s the corporate version of Mom and Apple Pie. Yet, for all of its attractiveness, collaboration has turned out to be harder to achieve than people expect. There are many reasons for this, including cultural obstacles that prevent people from wanting to work together, e.g. in a hyper competitive work environment, people tend to help themselves, not others. Learn more in 5 Risks of Poor Collaboration in the Workplace.

Assuming the will to collaborate is present, the technology has to be available to make it happen. This, too, has proven difficult, though today the corporate world can choose from a rich array of sophisticated collaboration tools. Microsoft Teams, for instance, is powerful because it accommodates different personal work styles while integrating with the universal “productivity infrastructure” of the Microsoft Office system.

If you’re contemplating a program to stimulate better productivity, here are five benefit you’ll realize in the process:

1) Higher profits

Companies that don’t foster strong collaboration experience a host of hidden costs as a result. These may arise from invisible but expensive problems like people sending multiple emails and making phone calls to get a single task accomplished. Every person/minute in your business costs you something. The more time people waste in non-collaborative processes, the higher your costs will be. Collaboration drives productivity, which drives profits.

2) Stronger growth potential

Collaborative organizations move faster than those without. This enables them to take on more work and facilitate revenue growth. A good collaboration culture, backed by the right technologies, can also adapt to new modes of business—enabling agility and strategic advantage.

3) Improved morale and organizational cohesion

People who don’t like their jobs make their feelings known in ways that can be hard to see, but are nonetheless toxic to an effective organization, e.g. passive aggressive slowdowns, counter-productive perfectionism and so forth. This phenomenon can range from simple frustrations about getting work done to outright battles between people who can’t find ways to work together. Collaboration technology will not solve all of these problems, of course, but it can create a digital workspace where people can find ways to cooperate without cramping their individual styles. The results include better moral and organizational cohesion.

4) Better recruitment results

Prospective employees, particularly those from the newer generation entering the workforce, want to work in positive, collaborative environments. This is a digital native generation that is accustomed to mobile chat apps, social networks and the like. The office should be an extension of that experience.

5) Better talent retention

Once hired, people tend to stay in places where they like the work experience. This may seem obvious, but so many companies fail to connect the dots—proclaiming the value of collaboration but failing to deliver it, in tech terms. For some employees, this may be the factor that drives them out the door. A costly, productivity-sapping recruitment process arises as a result.

Learn more in Improving Collaboration With Microsoft Teams.

Interested in Microsoft Teams? Achieve Ultimate Collaboration in Just 2-3 Weeks

Get a head start with the Teams Quick Start Program from CCS Technology. We can get you up and running on the Microsoft Teams platform in 2-3 weeks so you can transform productivity and translate into more effective meetings, greater revenues, and profits. Click here to learn more.

5 Risks of Poor Collaboration in the Workplace

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Collaboration sometimes comes across as a soft subject. It’s in the “nice to have” category, but somehow removed from serious business matters. If this was ever the case, it no longer is. Collaboration is at the heart of many critical business processes, especially as business grow more virtual and geographically spread out. Strategy execution relies, in large part, on effective collaboration. It’s how earnings grow. Poor collaboration comes with business risks. Solutions like Microsoft Teams help you avoid the consequences of poor collaboration.

Briefly, What is Collaboration in the Modern Business?

In simple terms, collaboration refers to two or more people working cooperatively on the execution of a project or task. It’s a familiar process, something most of us have been doing since nursery school. In the modern business context, however, collaboration is a much richer and involved activity.

Collaboration today means people working closely with one another, regardless of whether they are in the same physical space. It encompasses file sharing, collaborative document editing, task management, project tracking, phone/video/chat and web meetings. It the process that leads to the realization of team- and business-wide objectives.

5 Risks of Poor Collaboration

Poor collaboration can have a number of negative effects on a business. Some are (expensive) nuisances. Others could actually threaten a company with legal problems or security risks. Here are five major risks of poor collaboration, based on our experience working with many clients on collaboration technology projects:

1. Wasting time

This may not seem like such a big deal, but it is. Employees are expensive. Every minute wasted with sub-optimal collaboration tools nips earnings from the bottom line. For example, a few minutes wasted searching for the most recent draft of a document, across every team in the company, hundreds of times a year, can really add up. Microsoft Teams solves this problem by embedding enterprise search right into the collaboration interface.

2. Poor project management

Teams frequently use collaboration tools to manage projects. The better the tool, the more smoothly the project management process will go. The reverse is also true. If task assignments, follow ups, document sharing, scheduling and so forth are difficult, team members may abandon the tool and work through email and chat. This is sub-optimal and may impair project execution. Microsoft Teams provides extensive project management and tracking functionality.

3. Poor execution of strategy

In the aggregate, projects and collaborative work roll up to overall business strategy. Without the right tools, your teams cannot execute on strategies. The negative effects of this collaboration risk will appear in results at the end of the period.

4. Negative impact on morale and team cohesion

Employees may spend a great deal of their time inside the collaboration interface. If the experience is challenging or counter-productive, this can affect morale and team cohesion. People get stressed out when their tools can’t help them get their jobs done or meet their personal career goals.

5. Security risks

Collaboration often involves sharing confidential information and access to internal systems. Hackers may try to exploit vulnerabilities in the collaborative ecosystem to access data and digital assets. Microsoft Teams mitigates this risk with countermeasures like encryption for data in transit and chat.

The right collaboration software can make a difference when it comes to avoiding these risks and related problems in getting teams to work together productively. Get a head start with the Teams Quick Start Program from CCS Technology. In just 2 to 3 weeks we will get you up and running on the Microsoft Teams Platform, which can enhance productivity–translating into more effective meetings, greater revenues, and profits. Click here to learn more.

Learn more in Improving Collaboration With Microsoft Teams.

Improving Collaboration with Microsoft Teams

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The drive for better ways to collaborate in corporate life never stops. As organizations grow more geographically spread out, virtualized and matrixed, workers need to be able to work together with as few obstacles to productivity as possible. A team with members on different continents might convene to complete a task. How will they get their work done efficiently? This is partly a matter of culture. People have to want to collaborate. But, assuming the desire is present, effective collaboration is mostly about having the right software.

Collaboration Tools: An Ongoing Story of Evolution

The history of online collaboration tooling parallels the development of networked computers. At first, the mere ability to send an electronic mail (email!) message from on PC to another was nothing short of a revolution. From there, the industry has produced a long series of increasingly advanced collaboration products.

Early on, teams collaborated using a variety of solutions at the time – chat in one app, web meetings in another, document repositories in a third place and so forth. Now, with Microsoft Teams, we have one collaboration solution that unifies the most common functions required to enable people to get things done productively.

The Collaboration Advantages of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams represents a significant advance in a long line of Microsoft collaboration tools. It combines chat, voice and video calling, online meetings and integration with productivity applications like Word and Excel. As a native component of the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem, Teams offers an intuitive, natural fit with the way people work today.

A typical collaborative use case for Teams might look like this: Bob video calls Sally in Teams to discuss a document they’re both assigned to write. To resolve an issue in the writing, Bob pulls up the document in Teams. With Sally and Bob both able to see the document, they can collaboratively edit it in real time. In the process, they realize they have questions for Joe and Betty. Through Teams, they can see Joe and Betty’s presence. They then kick off a web meeting where all four of them can talk about the document.

Teams adds a powerful search capability to collaborative mix. This helps solve a problem that has vexed the collaborative process for years: the difficulty finding the most recent and relevant material. Teams enables search for content, tools, contacts and conversation threads. The search feature connects with SharePoint, OneNote and Planner. Team members can instantly find what they’re looking for. Documents shared in Microsoft Teams are automatically saved to the cloud. Team members are always working from the latest version without the need to search for it.

Users of Teams have the ability to tailor workspaces with any specialized content or apps they need. For instance, a Team user could add a tab for a Word document or Power BI dashboard. He or she could also add Jira or Trello if those are required to keep people working together productively.

On the back end, Teams gives IT managers sophisticated security and configuration controls. This is a sometimes-neglected aspect of the collaboration story. A collaboration tool must be easy to administer. It has to be subject to security policies.

Interested in Microsoft Teams? Achieve Ultimate Collaboration in Just 2-3 Weeks

Get a head start with the Teams Quick Start Program from CCS Technology. We can get you up and running on the Microsoft Teams platform in 2-3 weeks so you can transform productivity and translate into more effective meetings, greater revenues, and profits. Click here to learn more.