Collaboration is critical to business success at every level. Employees need to work together both within teams and across departments and increasingly, with the rise of remote work, from disparate location. Unfortunately, without the right tools, it’s easy for staffers to get stuck in silos. That can hold your company back from attaining optimal performance, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

By embracing the right technology, your business can improve enterprise-level communication and collaboration and get your staff working together easily and with enthusiasm. As often as technology separates us from each other, it can also unite your company and enhance your relationships with clients.

Your Communications Center

In order for technology to enable better collaboration within your company, it needs to support several different activities, and one of the most fundamental elements is standardization. When businesses don’t have standardized communications protocols, it can lead to confusion, misunderstandings, and general disorganization. 

Finding the right communications tool does two things to address this problem; first, they create a central communication hub so that staff always know where to look for key information. Second, by having that central communication destination, staff also know how they are expected to communicate, whether they’re registering a concern or trying to send a real-time message to a coworker. It’s a means of clarifying and streamlining.

Engagement And Distraction

Another major communication problem stymieing collaboration at SMBs today is the issue of distraction and disengagement. We’re not talking about staff browsing Facebook when they should be working – that’s a different sort of problem – but rather, a kind of communications overload. 

Many of today’s companies use a collection of communications tools to keep staff connected: Slack, Facebook Workplace, email, Google Chat, and more. These tools have all transformed the workplace in recent years, but at this point, no one can keep up with all of those platforms, information gets lost, and staff cognitively log off, even if they’re signed in. What centralized communications tools like Happeo do is replace these disparate parts with one tool to enable collaboration and keep staff actively engaged. The hub also provides centralized data on communications and engagement that’s normally restricted to client communications. But why wouldn’t we want that same information about in-house connections?

Reaching Remote Teams

Historically – before Google’s suite of tools and Slack – companies used paper memos, meetings, and intranet to keep staff connected. With more staff working remotely, though, teammates may never have met, so how are they supposed to collaborate? Companies are certainly making it work, but it’s an uphill battle. 

One thing that businesses are discovering, though, is that focusing on employee experience (EX) the way they would focus on user experience (UX) makes a big difference. Many have started incorporating staff profile sections as part of their communication centers, for example, which can help everyone from individuals at huge corporations and remote teams feel better connected. And most staffers feel more confident and connected when they know how to best communicate with other team members, so centralization improves relationships within remote teams, as well.

Collaboration isn’t just an activity – it’s a mindset and today’s businesses can’t survive without it. Still, staff will resist working together if companies make it too difficult or they don’t feel like they know who they’re working with. 

Centralizing and standardizing communication is the first step toward changing that mindset and transforming our businesses into thriving, exciting places to work.