Business collaboration is an important part of running a competitive company nowadays. In order to truly make the most of your resources, whether you’re a small startup in Asia or a European branch of a huge multinational corporation, the key to running a great business is by working together. Now, sure, it may sound a little cheesy. You’ve heard it a thousand times: “the key to great business is by having a great team.” The thing is, it’s really that simple.
Having a great team, in turn, is about making sure people can talk to each other and know what they’re doing. According to Accenture, many executives (64 percent) feel that they should be reaping greater benefits through collaboration. Keeping that communication and collaboration maintained and running smoothly requires the right approach, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about here today.
Create a Business Communication Platform
It sounds fancy, but basically this means having an appropriate platform through which to communicate with your fellow employees and executives. Now, you may think email is already enough for all of your needs. While that may be true in some cases, your email does have shortcomings.
No, there hasn’t been an app powerful and useful enough to kill email entirely. However, that’s not the point here. The point is that, if you want to really leverage your company’s resources and talent, then you need something more than text.
That’s where video calling comes in. Video calling has been making a huge comeback among IT-conscious enterprises recently, thanks to its growth and the development of the premium VOIP market. Through the innovation of large companies like Microsoft and Cisco, there have been major breakthroughs in how people – especially at home – can talk to each other face to face in spite of thousands of miles of distance.
In the business-to-business market, web calling has made breakthroughs of a different kind, most specifically in the world of social collaboration. Today, making a call with video is exceptionally easy, and through a premium service provider like Blue Jeans, enterprise video conferencing for IT and other departments has become trivially easy to set up and reap.
The problem here is that it’s not so much the importance of communication that needs to be underlined, but rather the difficulty of actually I’m-plementing software solutions that solve the little inefficiencies most companies are plagued with.
For video calling, one of the best options for proving a point of convenience and efficiency is by completely restructuring the way you hold and host meetings within your business. Build up to a more efficient way to hold meetings by simply starting them through a video conference call. Not all meetings have to take place in the digital space, but at the same time, not all meetings need to be performed on a physical, face-to-face basis. Prioritize the importance of some meetings over others, or make non-essential meeting members a digital audience to the key meeting itself.
Another way to work on your company’s collaborative abilities and communication skills is by building a working social dashboard wherein employees can keep a detailed profile of themselves and detail what they’re currently working on, commenting on the work of others and contributing freely between projects.
Manage an Online Forum
Another way to help your company through collaborative efforts is by establishing a forum or database of questions that anyone – from employees to executives – can give a detailed answer to.
