How well do your people work together? When it comes to increasing business growth and output, making it easier for your people to collaborate is key to enabling higher productivity and increasing engagement. To bring teams together, unified communication and collaboration tools are now vital.
According to research conducted by Deloitte Access Economics and Deloitte Digital for Google back in 2017, collaboration is worth $46 billion a year to Australian businesses.
They arrived at this figure by analysing productivity, profitability, employee satisfaction, improved product quality and innovation. According to the study, companies that prioritise collaboration are:
- Five times more likely to experience an increase in employment
- Twice as likely to be profitable
- Twice as likely to outgrow competitors.
Working in teams enables employees to become better informed and knowledgeable, which in turn helps them become more effective in their work. Because collaborating helps employees become more responsible, it also helps increase engagement and motivation levels.
As the modern workplace evolves to reflect employees’ expectations of more enterprise mobility and flexibility, businesses have had to adapt and change the way they operate. And this is where collaboration is essential.
Unified communications collaboration defined
Collaboration takes place when a group of people work together towards achieving a common goal by sharing their ideas and skills. In the enterprise, collaboration enables fluid communication to improve:
- Knowledge sharing
- Information gathering, and
- The ability for employees to work together on projects, no matter their location.
To get your people collaborating more effectively, unified communication and collaboration tools can help you get there. UC enables employees to collaborate by taking advantage of:
- Video conferencing
- Messaging
- IM and presence
- Screenshare
Unified communications and collaboration tools
Unified communications video conferencing
Enabling anytime, anywhere face-to-face collaboration within your business, with video conferencing your people can work together more efficiently right across your organisation, no matter where they are located. The ability to read facial expressions is valuable in any meeting. The ease of handling multiple calls without leaving their desks helps employees get the job done more efficiently.
Unified communications video conferencing, offers the benefit of face-to-face collaboration with anyone in the world. For mid-to-large sized companies with 100 to 1,000 employees, video conferencing can be used to eliminate the lag caused by travel to and from meetings, traffic and weather incidents, or even in situations where companies are split across several floors or buildings.
Instant Messaging
When it’s integrated with presence technology – and employees are trained on how to use it properly – instant messaging can boost collaboration by increasing the speed at which information is shared. By making it quick and easy for employees to contact each other and get answers to simple queries fast, IM can help to maintain strong engagement levels among team members. IM also reduces slowdowns that are commonplace when waiting to receive email responses.
And, as we discussed in a previous blog post, instant messaging also encourages users to be brief and to the point. This helps to reduce the time it takes for decision making, problem solving, and completing tasks.
Unified communications presence technology
Unified communications presence essentially allows colleagues to see the accessibility and availability of other colleagues. By knowing how accessible you are, they can choose the most appropriate method of communication with you at a given time. For example, this technology can automatically inform others of whether or not you are in the office, whether you don’t want to be disturbed, or if you are on a conference call, at lunch, or are working from home.
Incorporated into your unified communications platform, presence technology allows your people to see exactly who is available to communicate at any given time, and how best to communicate with them.
By knowing who is available and unavailable, it encourages employees to call one another instead of using emails. The addition of click-to-call capability lets the user call another employee by simply clicking on their contact details.
Screenshare
Screen sharing makes collaboration visual and interactive and can be used for anything from webinar presentations, to live customer support interactions, to a quick review of a design with a colleague.
Allowing two or more users to share their screens with other people online, screensharing allows you to present a design, document, or website exactly as it displays on your screen. In this way, you can get considered feedback and keep everyone on the same page.
Get everyone connected
imei has helped many businesses deploy vital unified communication and collaboration tools to increase workplace productivity and employee engagement. Contact our team for help and guidance around unified communication and collaboration tools.
