Productivity suites are universally one of the best tools for getting work done in the business world, so if you’re not familiar with the term, then take a moment to consider how often you use Microsoft Office products or the Google Workspace apps. These are productivity suites, and they are remarkably important and valuable for your company, whether you realize it or not.

Communication is a key part of doing business. Today, there are a variety of solutions devoted to improving your business’ communications strategy in some way, shape, or form. Here, we’ll go over the communications tools that businesses use today, and discuss why today’s business should be invested in most or all of them.

Most business owners are looking for a way to cut their costs. One way that many firms can see some cost reduction is to increase productivity through solid collaboration. Today, there are many digital tools designed to get more eyes on a project, but they may not completely fit your strategy. Let’s look at some strategies that are used to promote collaboration, and some tools that can fuel these enhanced collaborative efforts.

Ultimately, your employees are going to be the ones using your technology to accomplish their daily duties, so it helps to treat them like customers rather than end users. If you examine industry trends to make the best decisions possible with your technology and communications solutions, then you’ll allow your team to flourish in the process.

What is VoIP?

At first glance, VoIP is almost indistinguishable from the telephone services you are used to using—in fact, you’ve likely used it before.

“What does—and doesn’t—work?”

To motivate your team to take ownership over their responsibilities and invest in your successful operations, you need to communicate that what they say has credence. Your team can be a goldmine of insights if you hear what they have to say. Think about it, they’re the ones that have hands-on experience using the tools that you’ve put in place.

Understanding Smart Scheduling

These software solutions are commonly found in industries that are subject to a lot of outside influence and fluctuating demand due to a variety of factors, such as retail. Smart scheduling gives these businesses the capability to schedule their employees more effectively, using automation to simplify the process.

Let’s review what true collaboration is, and how you can lead your company towards more collaborative behaviors in your day-to-day undertakings.

Teamwork and Collaboration Aren’t the Same Thing

First, it is important that we define the difference between these two seemingly synonymous terms. While it is possible to work as a team without collaborating, collaboration requires some element of teamwork to be present.

On July 3rd, the Tony-winning Broadway musical was released on Disney+, meaning that history buffs and theater nerds alike don’t have to Wait for It. Even better, you can now watch Hamilton with all your friends. We Know, it’s pretty cool, especially since you don’t all need to be In the Room Where it Happens. Let’s go over how you can arrange that in this song-title-pun-filled blog.

Video Conferencing

Video conferencing tools were useful before the COVID-19 pandemic caused the implementation of stay-at-home orders. Now, it is a tool that everyone uses to catch up with people in all types of situations. For the business, it is a huge benefit to be able to meet from anywhere at the click of a button. Since commercial-grade video conferencing solutions need a little more than your individual-license ones, it is important to find one with the features a business needs. They include:

• Screen sharing
• Instant messaging and group chat features
• HD Video
• Recording
• Multiple-webcam options
• Encrypted file sharing

Communication Solutions

Many, many solutions devoted to keeping people in touch and in the loop are now commonly hosted in, and delivered through, the cloud. This method only makes sense, as it enables your team to fully collaborate whenever an Internet connection is available. Take extra steps to foster these habits in your organization at every possible opportunity.

Set Some Boundaries

Establish a Workspace

One of the first things that you should do when adopting a remote work approach is to give yourself guidelines. It can be immensely helpful to establish a set place to do your work, and equip it appropriately with minimal distractions. As a general rule, it is best if this area is not in the bedroom, or any area in your living space that you typically spend your recreational time. This will help you to keep up your focus throughout the day.

Have Them Socialize Outside of the Office

Let’s look at how kids behave for a moment… if told to partner up, they—almost automatically—gravitate toward their friends, the people they are comfortable spending time with. Your employees will do the same, both in and out of the office.

Collaboration greatly relies on some level of trust and familiarity, which is most effectively developed outside of the professional environment. Encourage your staff to socialize outside of work hours, or even treat them on occasion, on one condition: no shop talk. While your employees may not all be fast friends afterwards, they’ll understand one another much better and be able to work more effectively.

Tell Them What You Want

Speaking of efficacy, make sure your team understands what you expect from them in terms of results. This goes double when collaborative work is involved. A clear understanding of a task makes it easier to determine how to accomplish it, and how their combined efforts can best serve their purpose.

Walk the Walk

If you really want your team to work collaboratively, make the first move and involve yourself in the process. “Rank” or “position” should have no bearing on how able someone is to participate in a collaborative process, and there is no telling who could be struck with inspiration. Actively seek input from your team and demonstrate how you want your employees to work together.

Use Your Resources Wisely

While there’s a time for either, there is a difference between combining your resources to accomplish a given task and having your employees collaborate. The former is great if a lot of a single task needs to be finished quickly, but if a complicated process needs to be completed, it helps more to give the task to a group of people who have different proficiencies. This way, you have a better chance of the necessary skills being present in the group.

Acknowledge Accomplishments

A team that doesn’t feel appreciated is a team that won’t accomplish much. Why would they, if it doesn’t seem to matter whether they excel, or put out a thoroughly mediocre performance? This is especially the case if a single member’s performance is publicly singled out, as though they did all the work.

To encourage your team to perform well as a group, make sure that the entire group receives some recognition of their combined efforts.

Make Collaboration the Easy Option

Regardless of how motivated your team may be to collaborate with one another, it just isn’t going to happen if they don’t have the opportunity or means to effectively do so. While this may have been a more reasonable obstacle in the past, today’s available technology invalidates any excuse your team may have… mostly due to the Internet serving as the greatest collaborative tool the world has ever seen. The easier the collaborative process is, whether you lean on an Internet-based application or an internal resource or both to simplify things, the more likely it is for your employees to work with each other.

We’re Here to Help.

Coleman Technologies is ready and willing to deliver the solutions you need to promote collaboration among your staff. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to hear more about your options.

It’s not a secret that departmental cooperation is increasingly central to the workflows of today. Businesses need to stay agile, which means more has to be done with less. As more people take on more responsibilities, there needs to be better communication, and ultimately trust, if a business’ goals are going to be met. This has businesses of all sizes looking for tools that will help their staff be more collaborative, more efficient, and meet those benchmarks that will allow for organizational growth. 

Obstacles to Collaboration

It seems ironic that a strategy that most businesses need to foster, is actually getting harder to achieve. Today’s workforce is different in many ways, but one of the most glaring weaknesses of the modern workforce is that their needs supersede that of the organization they work for. This is not wrong per say, but it can be a major problem for smaller organizations that need collaborative initiatives to fuel their products and services. With the gig economy growing rapidly, and the cost benefits of hiring contract and outsourced workers, it makes it harder than ever to get a staff of people on the same page. 

There are several more barriers to collaboration, including:

• Differences in opinion
• Lack of respect and/or trust
• Internal competition
• Lack of solid project management

When you are asking people to work with others for a common goal, personalities can get in the way. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be some semblance of professionalism and workplace decorum, but the truth is that some people just don’t like working with other people. If you are running a small business petty squabbles are unacceptable and can really hurt your chances of success.

It is important that every member of a team knows exactly what is expected of them, but it’s the decision makers that need to understand who works well with who and what type of collaboration to use. There are three different types of positive workplace collaboration. They are:

• Simple Collaboration - The most basic form of collaboration. This is your typical information and document sharing. If someone needs an answer, someone else provides it.
  
  
• Document Collaboration - Document collaboration is a significant step because it means that people are actually working together on a single document towards a common goal. Giving multiple users the capability to work as though they were side-by-side without regard to the actual distance between them is not being integrated into many software platforms nowadays.
  
  
• Structured Collaboration - This is the type of collaboration in which people need to work together to complete a predefined goal. If they aren’t able to work together, there will be no product or service. Essentially, anyone that has worked on a project with someone else has taken part in a structured collaboration. 

Collaboration and Technology

Most businesses use technology to bridge the gap between departments, teams, and employees. Technology is making it more possible than ever to collaborate, and many of a business’ technology investments are made with collaboration in mind. The idea is that if employees are expected to use centralized management software like a Customer Relationship Management tool or a document management and storage system like Microsoft SharePoint, that all the information and resources are then available from one place, making collaborative work more possible. 

Today, there is new software that simplifies the process. Software like Microsoft Teams and Slack are designed simply as an instant messaging-fueled forum that integrates with many of the major CRMs and other management solutions, creating a central hub to speed up communication and collaboration. These applications allow teams to be more agile and more productive. 

Collaboration is a huge part of doing business in the information age. If you want to learn more about how technology can fuel your business’ productivity, reach out to the IT experts at Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428. 

In OneDrive, a user can share a singular file or folder pretty easily. All they have to do is log in, right-click on the file/folder, and click Share.

Sharing this way allows a user to share their content with one of their contacts, send it to an email address, or copy a shareable link and send it along through an instant message or, again, and email. Doing so gives the recipient access to make edits to it by default, but the sender can restrict them to read-only access if desired.

However, you probably don’t want to micromanage your entire team to make sure they are sharing files and folders with people actually authorized to receive them. Fortunately, by using the global settings of OneDrive, you can take control past the file/folder basis to control how a user can share documents.

Controlling a User’s File Sharing in OneDrive

Assuming that you have administrative access over your OneDrive account, sign in by visiting https://admin.microsoft.com/ before proceeding with the following steps:

•  Look for Admin centers on the left side of your display. Click SharePoint.
• You should then be directed to the new SharePoint admin center. If you are brought to the old one, you can go to the new on by clicking on Open it now.
• Again, on the left side of the screen, find Policies and click on Sharing.

Doing so means that you have edited the global settings, applying your changes to all accounts. To manage settings on a case-by-case basis, access Users, Active Users, and select the individual who you are attempting to manage. You should find a OneDrive tab, with adjustable Sharing options.

With privacy and security being so critical for contemporary businesses, you need to make sure you are doing everything you can to maintain control of your company’s information. Our security experts can help - reach out to us at (604) 513-9428 to get started.

Cloud Productivity

One option a business can take is by adding in a cloud productivity suite. Options like Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365 can bring a business a lot of value, without the typically massive capital outlay the yearly software license would command. Besides, you probably already need licenses for a word processor and spreadsheet app anyway. Inside the software there are integrated collaboration options that allow your team to work on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations together in real time.

Communication

Efficient collaboration is not possible without strong communications. Today, there are options out there where an organization doesn’t necessarily need to invest huge sums in replacing their normal communications strategy to get the benefits that innovations made in the solutions can bring. By utilizing instant messaging, web-based conferencing, and cloud-based email companies can improve their top-to-bottom communication without taking on a lot of extra cost.

Collaboration Apps

New innovations in communication software are now available that provide advanced collaboration options. Developed like a forum, but with direct communication options, and integrations with third-party applications, collaboration apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams have a lot of options to help drive team productivity forward.

If you are looking for ways to improve your organizational productivity, call the IT experts at Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428. 

Team Building Benefits

Many modern businesses have employees who don’t always work in the office, instead electing to operate remotely. However, it is important that these employees are still assimilated as a part of your team as a whole. A conferencing solution can allow you to keep your remote employees on the same page as your on-site employees, building camaraderie between coworkers despite any distance between them. The better your team is able to collaborate, the more effective they will be able to be in accomplishing their tasks, as they will have each other as a resource to lean on as needed.

Keep Your Team On-Task

Let’s face it, it can sometimes be hard to be sure that your employees are focused on the task at hand. This is especially true when you can only hear their voice, or see the responses they send back to you. A conferencing solution fixes this difficulty by giving you and your team a visual of each other, keeping everyone involved accountable and engaged.

Increase Your Collaborative Footprint

It wasn’t all that long ago that collaborating with someone a distance away was only possible over the phone or by physically traveling to meet with them. However, collaborative conferencing solutions have taken this distance and shrank it down to effectively nothing. Like the team building benefits we discussed earlier, your team is no longer restricted to one place, or to dealing with exclusively local coworkers, partners, and other resources.

Promote “Face-to-Face” Communication

A sizable portion of communication is non-verbal, which means that your solution needs to account for this balance. More traditional solutions didn’t take this into consideration - or rather, couldn’t. Modern collaboration solutions, on the other hand, allow you to communicate more completely by allowing you to witness these non-verbal cues. 

Conferencing Can Simplify Your Solution Set

Compared to legacy solutions, modern conferencing tools offer a much more comprehensive selection of features. As a result, you can reduce the number of solutions that your operations rely upon, cutting expenses and streamlining your processes. This makes it much easier to find success in communicating with your team, without sinking all of your capital into your solutions.

Coleman Technologies can assist you in establishing the collaboration solution that fits your needs, as well as any other IT implementation your business requires. Learn more by calling (604) 513-9428.

Hardware

Fortunately, the biggest hurdle to collaboration isn’t usually having the right solutions in the office, it’s primarily making sure that these solutions are being put to use properly.

Consider your Internet setup - is it strong enough to wirelessly provide your entire office with connectivity, or would you be benefitted by implementing additional access points? Do you have the hardware needed to communicate and share data with mobile employees, and most importantly, can you properly secure all of it? Speaking of mobility, you will also want to consider if you want to provide your staff with company-owned mobile devices instead of leveraging a Bring Your Own Device Policy. There are options out there to procure these devices for well below retail rates, as long as these devices are bought in bulk.

Software

Depending on your type of business, you may have more or less to do in order to promote collaboration in your organization. A brick-and-mortar establishment will likely have its resources centralized, which means that employees will need to have access to these resources in order to properly communicate with one another, sharing progress on their work. While a private cloud platform would serve this need quite well, these solutions are typically far too expensive for the average SMB to consider.

These SMBs do have other options. Cloud-hosted software allows a business to leverage just about any computing resources they need, whether its a productivity suite, a business management platform, or a communication tool. Adding to these benefits, these resources can be accessed wherever an Internet connection can be established thanks to an integrated access management system. This same system allows administrators to keep threats out of their network as well.

Policies

Finally, for there to be collaboration, there needs to be the policies in place that “encourage” (enforce) the stress-free sharing of pertinent data with team members. In other words, you need to know that you have a way for your employees to access the data they need to complete their tasks as the need arises.

Having these policies can be to your organization’s advantage. While some of your data needs to be kept on a “need-to-know” basis, giving your employees some guidance to navigate how other data should be shared can help you to keep your business’ data that much more secure. It also doesn’t hurt that digital communications are becoming more of the norm, so it only makes sense to give your employees an outlet to communicate in what is likely their preferred manner.

In short, businesses are communicating in new and exciting ways. Not only should you not want to be left behind, you can’t afford to be. For assistance in expanding your internal collaboration and business communications to fully embrace today’s capabilities, reach out to Coleman Technologies’s IT professionals at (604) 513-9428.