Whether you’re working with another company or department on a joint project, or require additional and more frequent communication with a client to complete your company’s work, the right technology and infrastructure can go a long way to vastly improving your efficiency, performance, and your business partner’s ease and comfort.
Through the Internet and its constant innovations, there have been several new developments in the name of better performance, meant to help improve management, communication and effective oversight in as many ways as possible. This begs the question: is your company using them all, and is your company using them well?
According to a 2015 study on an article by CIO, social networking alongside digital predictive analysis and cloud-based technology will be one of the most disruptive tech developments of the 2010s. Business collaboration is so different today versus in the past because of the fundamentals behind social networks.
Building an effective, fluid, and hierarchical role-based collaborative project is all about properly harnessing what made networks like Facebook so successful, and going beyond that – all without losing the thread on the most important aspect of the whole matter. Productivity is the goal, not distraction.
How Does Social Collaboration Work?
Social networking in the world of business performance is still a relatively new technology, so even the biggest baddies in the enterprising world are testing the waters and playing around with how it works in an effort to find that productive sweet spot. We live in a time where taking digital risks to improve your business’ performance is nearly an everyday matter, but no risk is ever taken without careful thought. That’s why utilizing the experiences of other companies is a good way to analyze and look at the different ways this has been approached.
One example is a fully fledged social network. Every employee outfits himself or herself with a profile within what could be construed as a company’s internal version of LinkedIn. This Intranet, exclusive to the company, allows all users (employees) to watch and keep track of one another’s work by regularly updating their workflow and progress, creating new content for the Intranet in the form of blog entries and status updates, and communicating over various ways between each other, from liking a project to engaging in a private chat or video conference.
This type of networking tries to tap into the latent will within any organization’s employee to truly contribute to the efficiency and productivity of its company, by giving employees much more of a voice to let out their ideas and come up with ways to improve the product or service. There will be no more going into exec meetings or requesting a chat with the company head. Ideas can be shared live on a large intra-department social network for all to see and consider.
Social collaboration doesn’t always have to take the form of such a complex suite of features, however. While there are various options to help enterprises implement something such as this, this is usually meant for large corporations with a sufficient employee base to justify a comprehensive social network.
For smaller companies, adopting the intranet as a way to collaborate on projects can be enough. File sharing over the cloud, for example, is one of the most disruptive examples of cloud technology within businesses, as it allows them to effortlessly move around and work on documents and projects with several departments working at once. In this case, then, the key to a successful collaboration most definitely becomes communication.
Whether it’s for the project briefing or a quick update on the status and plan for a collaborative project, a modern-day video conferencing service for IT companies has become the absolute best way to capture attention and promote working together, especially through a premium service like Blue Jeans.
Simple Ways Infrastructure Affects Collaboration
For cloud-based project collaboration, you’d think that utilizing an in-house server is a necessity. Thankfully, that’s not the case. With innovations in cloud-based and software-as-a-service industries, various companies offer their own networks and infrastructure for small businesses to make use of.
This is especially helpful in video conference technology. Through a more sophisticated and premium service, you can set up a much more secure corporate channel for your company to take advantage of, allowing you to set up file sharing during calls and meetings, displaying documents and slides within a conference call, calling a meeting between several dozen employees or even creating a live online press conference. The opportunities presenting themselves through today’s advances in video conferencing are immense.
Your company doesn’t have to worry much about computer specs. They can run premium video conference technology over their mobile phones. Focusing on mobile also allows you to focus on it as an aspect for your customers. According to the Daily Mail, we check our phones roughly 110 times a day. Harnessing that through business notifications can keep an employees’ mind on the project at hand.
In the end, social collaboration is all about interconnectivity. Through existing infrastructure and the Internet, your business can get more connected than ever.