Collaboration in a workplace plays an important role in the success of projects, teams, and the organization itself. Employee collaboration is your employees’ ability to communicate and work together. They can share their ideas to do something differently or to produce something different. From here, you can get an idea of what effective collaboration can do for you and how a lack of collaboration hurts your organization.
If you are a small organization with 50 employees, depending on your collaborative approach, and a properly-outlined statement of work for your project, you can miss out or gain $125,000.
The Impact of Effective Collaboration
Lack of collaboration hurts your organization in the following three key areas:
- Productivity
- Quality
- Profitability
Productivity
Collaboration in the workplace helps complete projects on time. Teams working together can work faster and take on more responsibilities. You want to take advantage of these advantages. In case your team does not collaborate, your bottom line suffers.
You can save $1,660 per employee annually from collaboration.
Even when you have only 50 employees in your organization, you can save $83,000 annually with collaboration in the workplace. There are expensive consequences of not working together. Without proper collaboration, the complexity of processes increases. The risk of making larger mistakes increases.
Quality
Collaboration does a lot more than keeping your teams happy. It helps in improving the quality of work. An organization can gain a value of $2,517 per employee with proper workplace collaboration.
If you are a small organization with 50 employees, depending on your Effective Collaboration approach, you can miss out or gain $125,000.
Profitability
Increased productivity and improved work quality mean more profit. Collaboration in the workplace also helps you outgrow your competitors.
Collaboration is important not only within the team but also in the team. You have to effectively collaborate with contractors, clients, and remotely working employees. Your remotely working employees may not be sitting in a cubicle next to you; they are part of your team and share responsibilities. They also have the same tasks and deadlines. The team can only achieve its goals with proper collaboration.
Following are the five roadblocks an organization has to overcome:
Missing Documents
You never have time to find an email attachment you received last week. Whether you downloaded that attachment or not, you will have to waste several minutes to find that document. What if you forgot to manage its versions? There are benefits of digitizing documents. However, you can only reap the full benefits if you have proper document management in place. Employees spend 5 to 25 minutes every time they have to search for a document.
You must spend less than 5 to 25 minutes on this. Your employees should be able to find documents with a few clicks and utilize this time to learn new skills.
Solution
You can address this problem with a cloud-based intranet collaboration software. Your employees can easily search, edit, and share documents. Cloud-based intranet collaboration solution allows employees to access documents anytime and from anywhere using different devices.
Version Control
Editing and emailing documents back and forth can clarify and uniform information shared among employees. You want your employees to access something other than an older version of the document. It is also important to keep track of who made what changes in the document, which is why version control is also very important.
Solution
Cloud-based intranet collaboration software also comes with version control. Version control is often a part of document management. Intranet collaboration solutions make sure that your employees access the latest version of each document. They can edit documents in real time. It is easy to track changes in documents.
Vague Expectations
Team members need to be aware of their roles and responsibilities. Vague expectations occur when employees need to know what duties they are responsible for. When this happens, they don’t follow through. The consequences of vague expectations include miscommunication and missed deadlines.
Solution
You can avoid this problem by using project management tools. You can assign tasks, attach files, and set deadlines. This keeps everyone on the same page. Your employees know what is due and when. Downloading attachments att, attaching files, and then sending emails waste valuable time. In project management tools, you need to tag someone to assign a task. To-do lists allow employees to keep track of their day-to-day tasks. You can avoid unnecessary delays.
Missed Deadlines
Even small organizations are capable of working on complex projects. However, complex projects include multiple dependent tasks. Each task must be completed on time for the project to be successful. This is why missed deadlines can be frustrating.
Solution
Project management tools and cloud-based intranet collaboration software include features like automated reminders. These can help you hold each team member accountable and reduce the project management burden.
Feature-packed cloud-based intranet collaboration software can address most of these roadblocks to effective collaboration. A cloud-based intranet solution also comes with many other useful features, such as content creation. If you are considering a cloud-based collaboration solution, make sure that you can customize it.
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