Collaboration is a critical consideration—especially nowadays, with more people than ever before working remotely. Fortunately, there are plenty of solutions available today that enable the level of communication necessary for effective collaboration to take place. Let’s go over some of the tools your business should embrace to fulfill its needs.
Calendar Sharing
Time management is a major part of effective collaborative work, simply in terms of ensuring that people are scheduled to complete their assigned duties in a timely manner and are available to meet up when the need arises. A shared calendar is a handy utility to support this goal.
Not only can a unified calendar platform make scheduling the time to spend on a task far simpler, it also ensures that the team can find the time to get together and collaborate effectively.
Cloud Storage and File Sharing
First, for your team to properly collaborate, they all will need to share access to the resources they need to work effectively. Utilizing a cloud solution can help accomplish this, as your team will all be able to access the same documents wherever they happen to be, working side-by-side (in the virtual sense) regardless of the actual distance between them.
Second, this helps to keep your data and information consistent. One up-to-date and fully edited version of a document is much better than a bunch of different versions all saved in different places with different edits made to them. A cloud storage solution that facilitates file sharing eliminates that scenario.
Instant Messaging
For what it is worth, a good instant messaging platform can be your team’s most valuable tool when it comes to internal communications. Email is extremely valuable, but it does offer a few drawbacks—namely, its tendency to pull attention away from a task and how disorganized it can quickly become. Instant messaging and its quick, short-form nature have less of an impact on focus and basically organizes itself.
As a result, your team members can quickly share ideas, source feedback, and ask questions without disrupting their coworkers or interfering with their day’s progress.
Conferencing
Finally, we can’t talk about collaboration without touching on the closest thing to face-to-face communication we have these days: video conferencing. As a stand-in for the in-person meeting, video conferencing can take some getting used to (mainly due to the delay) but ultimately serves its purpose very well. Conferencing is a good option when you need to work in a group under somewhat controlled positions… again, much like the typical meeting should be conducted.
If you need assistance implementing the tools used to enable these capabilities, reach out to the IT professionals at Data Net. Give us a call at (760) 466-1200 to learn more.
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