How to Boost Collaboration and Prepare Your Workforce for the Future

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Now’s the time to start deep cleansing your collaboration tools. As we’ve experienced this year, remote work is critical to surviving major disruptions. Like many organisations, yours might have quickly adopted solutions to enable remote work with the intent of ‘getting through’ lockdown.

Companies were forced to cobble together solutions that worked well for some teams but were virtually unusable for others. After that initial rush, your company may now be dealing with different solutions, apps, or platforms that don’t play so friendly with one another. You might also be using a mixed bag of on-premises and cloud solutions.

Today’s workplace communications consist of three main channels:

• Message: Sending text-based messages to colleagues and groups in real time
• Video: Live face-to-face virtual communication using computers and mobile devices
• Phone: Calling colleagues to exchange voice-only communication

All three options (message, video, and phone) are essential to today’s workplace, but they’re even more important in the context of remote work. All three components should ideally be embedded in an all-in-one inclusive cloud solution allowing communication through the users’ channel of choice.

Whatever your chosen communications platform, it should include open integration with your other business productivity applications such as Salesforce. If you’re one of those many organisations that have adopted Microsoft Teams for message and video, and have added-on direct routing to run your phone calls through, make sure the voice component also seamlessly integrates with the rest of your communications stack to reduce friction and give users a consistent experience.

platforms such as MSFT Teams, Salesforce so that they seamlessly interoperate and help you for example to add easily telephony to your existing MSFT Teams.

READ: Five things you’ll need in your ideal collaboration solution.

Why the all-in-one cloud collaboration solution benefits every part of an organisation

How it helps the Head of HR

Giving your team the right tools to collaborate is vital to their success in their role. It also plays a major role in the success of your company.

The easier it is for employees to connect and collaborate, the more likely they are to do so. This improves communication between teams, which can be reflected in communication with customers, and therefore their experience and opinion of your brand.

Better communication also leads to happier employees and a more productive working environment.

Offering the remote or flexible work options afforded by cloud communications gives you a better chance of attracting the best talent—especially Millennials and Gen-Z.

Improve employee engagement: 50.9% of remote employees are engaged at work, compared to 40.4% of office employees. Highly engaged business units result in 21% greater profitability.

How it helps the CIO

The role of the CIO used to be more about infrastructure, software and IT support. Now it’s about GDPR compliance, cybersecurity, strategy and how technology can improve business performance.

The role of the CIO is about enabling the success of the business by accurately answering its technology needs. CIOs are considering answers to questions such as, “How do I enable collaboration?” and “How do I facilitate margin?”. Improvements in these areas can be improved by addressing workflows and minimising cost by incorporating efficient tools via a single vendor.

The ultimate consideration is, “How do I enable people’s success and get their problems out of the way?”. How do you empower a workforce? If employees aren’t provided with the best technology that enables them to perform, they will find and implement tech solutions of their own. Thus, the introduction of “shadow IT” creates an unmanaged and disparate spread of technology tools that increase business costs and potential risks.

Giving your team the right tools to collaborate is vital to their success in their role. It also plays a major role in the success of your company. Click To Tweet

How it helps the CFO

The role of the CFO is also transforming. The CFO needs to prepare the company for new challenges. Building strong relationships and fostering a collaborative work environment will be the key to success. 

Implementing an effective modern collaboration solution is key to keeping up with the increasingly complex business environment and will help increase productivity by enabling teams to accomplish more. A connected team is a successful team!

An all-inclusive cloud solution will also help the business drive cost efficiencies. Fewer system management and vendor coordination hassles allow companies to improve operational efficiencies. Several other key financial benefits include:

• Eliminate expensive maintenance of on-premises and hybrid solutions. Free software upgrades for the life of the contract.
• Save 30-50% by migrating communications systems to the cloud and by consolidating multiple phone systems and telco providers across multiple sites.
• Move capital expenditure to operating expenditure for foreseeable, planned costs.

If you’re looking to create a more collaborative environment for the future of work in your office, as a CHRO, CIO or CFO, choosing the right technology is one the critical ways to achieve your goals.