Latin America. Héctor Sánchez, Vice President of Sales for BroadSoft in Latin America, points out that there is no denying that collaboration has reshaped the way human beings perform their daily tasks in their homes and workspaces.
Since our individualistic mentality has been modified to a collaborative mentality, a new trend has emerged where collective action and interdependencies play a transcendental role in survival and success. Collaboration is defined as a process in which a group of people explore their ideas to seek a solution that extends beyond their individual limited visions. Collaboration has always been working together as a team, but today, the success of many companies and businesses lies in how they can better collaborate to adapt to the growing need to develop new business models.
The role of digital collaboration tools
As companies continue to grow and advance at an ever-increasing rate, working in isolation becomes a disadvantage. The challenge of creating an adequate culture of collaboration is that if it is not managed correctly, a number of business resources will be lost, since this does not have immediate benefits. Implementing a collaborative approach to work can be difficult, especially when trying to shift the focus from individual achievement to team success. Making good decisions related to collaboration tools is crucial to creating a broader culture of openness. According to a study by Deloitte[1], 46% of companies globally that have effective collaboration tools see their organization as a competitive and productive business, compared to 22% that do not have such tools.
From these challenges, BroadSoft highlights some tips that can help companies take the first steps towards adopting new collaboration platforms and turn their teams into more attractive and dynamic elements:
Encourage open communication: Effective communication is critical to ensuring the success of any team's effort, whether they are tasked with creating a new product or planning for future improvements. When a team's communication skills are strong, it increases the chance that good ideas and best practices will be shared openly. Collaboration removes the boundaries of bringing people together, beyond traditional departments and organizations. To be productive working collaboratively, you need to get rid of the erroneous paradigm of being in one place physically. Team-One revolutionizes workspaces, making them more open and enabling the ability to share ideas through virtual meetings and files in the cloud. The beauty of the openness of the lines of communication is that it allows greater transparency between the different members and efficiency will be the result of this.
Do not rush: The transition from a team with an individualistic culture to a collaborative culture is not immediate. Pushing teams too hard will kill the urge to share and collaborate. This is an ongoing process that takes time, but brings with it the creation of relationships and trust in order to begin to introduce collaboration in situations that require imagination, structure and the voluntary exchange of knowledge and ideas. As your team becomes more comfortable with the idea of working together, they will become more creative and build stronger relationships.
Use appropriate collaboration tools: The use of emails ceased to be a productive tool, why? due to the delay between replies and clutter in inboxes when too many emails are received. Instead, the best alternative is to use collaborative tools that facilitate options in how we interact whether it's voice, video, text, or document sharing, to achieve faster, more effective results, wherever they are. The lines of communication have never been as accessible and open as now through the network and it's time to take advantage of that. Collaboration tools, in particular, are a place where information can be stored over a cloud connection, as well as improving the efficiency of business processes by allowing storage and access to data in a centralized, highly secure location rather than sending slow-response emails.
Establishing a collaborative policy is just the beginning. For all of these tips to be effective, companies need to be consistent and aware of the resources dedicated to making this model successful. The companies that will survive an increasingly competitive market in the future will be those that give more and more value to digital collaboration schemes and that look for new ways to promote it within their teams, both traditional and virtual.
