5 Keys to Designing Modern Collaboration in Today's Workplace

oday, collaboration is key to growth.

Regardless of who you are or where your brand comes from, it is impossible to move forward if you're not taking active steps toward collaboration.

Luckily, this goal is easier to accomplish than you might think.

When collaboration flows freely, companies are more capable of creating disruptive, innovative products that produce sales and drive the brand forward.

In this post, we will break down five keys to designing modern collaboration in today's workplace. Read on.

The 5 Essentials of Modern Collaboration in Digital Workplaces

Unified communication is essential to good collaboration. Here is a breakdown of the five must-haves for designing your digital workplace.

1. Simplicity

If collaboration is going to thrive, teams cannot be doing too much. In other words, tools must be kept simple, and employee expectations regarding technology must be in-line with the collaborative vision. This is essential when it comes to companies using software to support collaboration.

According to one recent survey, roughly 50 percent of end users reported avoiding enterprise software because they believed it was excessively complicated. With this in mind, the importance of simplicity is evident.

If brands want to thrive in collaboration, they must keep their systems and expectations simple. They must provide a streamlined login system, a simple application that tracks multiple data sets from a single dashboard, and minimal devices.

The easier it is for employees to use collaborative tools, the more likely they are to take advantage of them.

2. Defined Teams

Research shows that when teams have three or more people, their ideas enjoy 156 percent more approval with customers than do those originating from smaller teams.

As such, organizations that want to promote collaboration must create defined teams of a handful of people, and they must support them in working together on various projects.

This is especially important in the digital economy, where companies are beginning to realize those disruptive ideas are what ultimately drives the industry forward. Teams are much more effective and innovative when a company integrates a diverse workforce. Companies must also create teams that work on other teams.

Today, 84 percent of employees work on multiple teams in a single organization, and this inter-disciplinary focus can bring a unique edge to a new team. These so-called "highly matrixed team members" offer several benefits for collaboration.

Not only do they collaborate more effectively, but they are more engaged and more deeply committed to quality. This variability produces outstanding results for a company and ensures good outcomes.

3. Unified Collaboration Solutions

Additional research has shown that moving to a unified collaboration solution can reduce licensing, software and IT support costs by upward of 10 percent.

Despite this, many decision-makers are reluctant to change up their communications technologies. This is unfortunate because it only serves to impede collaboration.

By implementing a unified collaboration software, organizations can save on total cost of ownership and simplify their user interface.

This step also encourages ongoing collaboration between diverse teams and ensures access to data and current projects in real-time. Unified collaboration helps cuts down on hands-on time, minimizes mistakes and crossovers, and makes it easier for teams adopt a mobile modern workplace.

4. Cloud Services

The primary benefit of cloud services is that they make it easy for teams to access projects in real-time.

Today, 40 percent of organizations either use or plan to use cloud telephony services. Even more than that use video conferencing, cloud web and cloud email services.

While cloud services are convenient, their benefit extends much further than that. Cloud services support collaboration by enabling companies to take a step back from the process of managing infrastructure, thereby letting them invest that time and energy into focusing on core business priorities.

What's more, cloud services are unified, which means they make collaboration easy and ensure bandwidth consumption is as efficient as possible. Cloud services also have minimal upgrades and maintenance, and they present incredibly limited service disruption.

5. Trust

Trust is one of essential factors of collaboration.

For teams to efficiently collaborate, they need to trust the collaboration software they are using. This means these platforms must protect data, unify communications and offer enterprise-grade IT control.

When companies and employees trust their collaboration software, they can quickly put aside concerns about cybercriminals and communication tools and focus, instead, on collaboration and outcomes.

Conclusion

In recent years, there has been a 50 percent increase in collaborative work.

This makes sense when you consider that collaboration is essential for any organization that wants to move forward and succeeds in creating innovative new products and solutions.

While collaboration has always been a critical factor in good businesses, it is essential now than ever before, as is the software that collaborators use to innovate and create.

When collaborating teams can trust the software they are using, when data is updated and tracked in real-time, and when communications are unified and streamlined, collaboration flows like a river.

Collaboration becomes blocked when any of these things aren't true, as if behind a dam. It is time to turn the dam into a free-flowing river.