Teamwork is always the underlying element for business success, now more than ever, considering today’s remote working environment. The remote work revolution has caused companies to increasingly let their employees work from home, requiring geographically diverse team members to work in unison to attain corporate goals.
So, why is remote collaboration important?
74% of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to reduce their office space, thanks to anywhere working. Remote work calls for seamless collaboration among teams, and the digitalization of business processes endows companies with remote work capabilities. Remote collaboration is essential because it can:
- Increase productivity,
- Optimize workflow processes,
- Strengthen team relationships,
- Help manage projects better, and
- Improve communication.
A robust virtual collaboration environment must be in place for remote work to be productive. Your business needs the support of a smart digital workplace solution integrated with efficient collaboration tools to enable its dispersed team members to seamlessly share data to meet goals faster.
What are collaboration tools?
Remote collaboration tools are the different kinds of software and services that allow your geographically diverse teams to work together to meet business goals. They eliminate the limitations of geographical locations as impediments to teamwork and equip your team members with the right capabilities to work in conjunction with each other to complete projects. You need a suite of various collaboration tools integrated into your digital workplace platform because they bring diverse benefits to the table.
Read more: How A Collaboration Software Can Improve Productivity
A few benefits of remote collaboration
1) Increases productivity
Productivity is vital to increasing profits and efficiency. A productive workforce is a key to sustained business growth. Your remote employees have more time saved by eliminating unnecessary commutes, which can be effectively used to complete tasks faster. Likewise, virtual meetings consume less time than face-to-face meetings. In short, remote work helps your employees save a lot of time which they can productively use to complete their work faster and smarter.
2) Eases problem-solving
Collaboration enables diverse skill sets to come together to carry out tasks and address any challenges. Seamless sharing of knowledge can help resolve problems with more efficiency and address the blind spots, if any, with more ease, thus optimizing workflow processes.
3) Allows freedom and flexibility at work
One of the biggest boons of remote work is enabling your employees to enjoy more freedom and flexibility at work. The employees have ample time to accommodate their personal and professional lives while clocking the required work hours and completing tasks on time. This serves to ease work pressure and foster trust while leaving your employees more satisfied.
4) Saves cost for both employers and employees
Remote work relieves employers of the need to pay huge rentals for their office premises. Even in a hybrid environment, the physical premises of the office need to be retained only on a limited scale, thus saving huge costs which are otherwise incurred in the form of rents payable to huge commercial spaces. Remote work eliminates the costs of transportation, childcare, and work wear for employees, thus adding up to their savings.
Thus, it is imperative for businesses to foster smart and effective collaboration among their employees to help the latter thrive in an increasingly digital working environment. Remote collaboration requires your teams to leverage technology to nurture communication among their members to work collaboratively to complete projects.
Here are 5 tips to improve remote collaboration
1. Set clear-cut goals and allocate tasks effectively
Your employees must be given a clear idea of the goals set. Removing uncertainty around the goals would help improve remote communication, increase productivity, and track the progress of projects. Set periodic milestones in well-defined terms, the progress of which can be tracked and displayed on custom dashboards to be viewed by the relevant persons.
2. Plan and schedule regular meetings
Meetings should be set in a recurring pattern such that your employees get to know beforehand about it and plan their home and work life around it. Video calls and meetings, single and group chats can be done in real-time on digital platforms and made more fruitful by the data sharing feature of digital workplace solutions.
3. Set boundaries for communication
Timelines should be set for communication which the teams should strictly follow to avoid false assumptions and misconceptions that could adversely affect team relationships and dynamics. Respecting the timeline for communication is important because the line between personal and professional lives blurs when working remotely and because diverse teams would be working in different time zones. The importance of the matter to be conveyed merits the type of communication that needs to be used, like email, instant messaging, phone calls, etc.
4. Create a collaborative environment by setting up multiple communication channels
A torrential flow of data through a single channel of communication can cause the information to get lost and people to disconnect. Your teams need a digital platform that streamlines communication by dedicating separate discussion channels for separate tasks such that the right set of data reaches only the relevant personnel. Smart digital workplace platforms offer a multitude of avenues for effective communication among teams, like email, audio calls, one-on-one, and group video calls, individual and group chats, etc.
5. Create custom dashboards for smarter data analysis
Creating a custom dashboard on your digital workplace platform is the smartest way to track the progress of your projects. A smart, personalized dashboard simplifies data analysis and displays the right sets of metrics to the relevant people, thus giving transparency to the progress of tasks. Your employees get to stay on top of company updates and seamlessly share data through standard and custom tiles on custom dashboards designed exclusively to meet your unique business needs.
Read more: How Can Organizations Profit More from Collaboration Software?
Effective remote collaboration thus improves productivity and builds healthy relationships among your employees while keeping them engaged at work. Businesses must embrace smart digital workplace solutions to make them future-ready and create a smart digital working environment for their remote employees. The challenges of cloud technologies are ever-evolving, and so are your business needs. A smart digital workplace solution like InfinCE would be your best buddy to promote smarter collaboration among your dispersed teams because:
- Its feature-packed collaboration apps affect smarter and streamlined communication among your teams.
- The employee directory on the platform lists all details of your internal and external contacts, allowing you to initiate a call, chat, or email directly from the directory.
- You can choose the right collaboration application from our extensive collaboration suite to help your employees connect better with remote team members and work together to meet goals.
- Individual and group chats can be made more meaningful through seamless and secure sharing of files.
- Build trusted relationships through the multiple communication apps integrated with the platform.
- Leverage centralized data using custom tiles on multiple dashboards.
InfinCE is the one-stop digital workplace solution that can make your business future-ready with infinite scaling-up capabilities to meet the ever-evolving challenges of the digital ecosystem. Get in touch with our experts to know more.
