Real-Time Collaboration Eliminates Disjointed, Asynchronous Team Work Efforts

Nearly every worker today likely communicates with someone who isn’t under the same roof. Whether it’s a branch office to a headquarters, marketing to a call center, office workers to home-based or road-based employees or different departments on different campuses, we spend a lot of time today communicating with people we need to share information with. Often, this information is multichannel…a phone call might need to be accompanied by a graphic, and a text chat might include a link. The more complex the need to collaborate with other employees or partners becomes, the more inefficient older processes become. Who hasn’t been one of the recipients on a never-ending, fruitless e-mail chain that goes on for days, when a conference call could have accomplished the same thing in minutes?

Increasingly, real-time, multichannel collaboration is necessary to stay in business. Employees need a way to communicate effectively with other workers, whether that person is on a different floor of the building or on the other side of the planet. During the course of the interaction, those employees may need to bring more people into the collaboration session. Finding a way to accomplish this quickly with minimal loss of time, money and knowledge is an important task for businesses to accomplish today, according to a recent article by Jens Koerner writing for EnterpriseAppsTech.

“Most of the time, workers need to collaborate with other employees to complete tasks or determine best ways to move forward if there is an issue,” he wrote. “Just as often, they may need to source knowledge or expertise from other employees – for instance, the marketing exec may need to respond to a support question on Twitter while a salesperson needs assistance responding to an RFP. Employees use a variety of tools to collaborate and crowdsource, like emails, instant messaging, conference calls and in-person meetings.”

If the platforms for these e-mails, Web chats, IMs, documents and spreadsheets and video conference calls are all different, good luck pulling them together in a way that isn’t cumbersome (if it’s even possible at all). In an ideal collaboration environment, the channels would all be on the same platform.

“With an enterprise collaboration solution, collaboration is transformed,” wrote Koerner. “Formal and informal teams within the organization can create groups to collaborate on projects. These groups can even create collaborative projects and can include individually-assigned tasks and due dates, alerting employees when a particular assignment needs to be completed. All of these interactions are archived within the social activity feed and employees can refer to or share these conversations at any time.”

With everyone on the same real-time platform, there are no duplicated efforts, lost or ignored communications, hunting for documents and onerous rounds of approvals, thanks to the unified activity stream. Workers can attain the kind of dynamic, interactive innovation that face-to-face sessions are famous for…even when they’re thousands of miles apart.