Communication & Collaboration

The world of work is changing drastically under the conditions of modern technologies. More and more employees are given the opportunity to work from home or on the road and only partially or no longer appearing in the physical office. Especially against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced quite a few companies in Germany and worldwide to let their employees work completely digitally without preparation, many companies are now rethinking. 

For a long time, communication & collaboration only took place on-site, but over the last few years it has increasingly become part of digital working: communication via services, such as Microsoft Teams Messenger, became the standard and collaboration mainly took place via platforms in which employees could record their tasks. Although many processes have already been digitized, most companies are still a long way from being able to manage business completely digitally.

But what are the biggest challenges you need to consider? What exactly does communication & collaboration mean in the digital age and how do you go about ensuring that both employees and the company benefit from the changeover? What specific measures will be needed to make business processes tangible for all contributors? 

39%

of German companies enable home office work.

Trend towards the home office

The number of companies that allow their employees to work remotely (mobile) has almost doubled in recent years. Just under half of the employees surveyed still work from an office on a regular basis. Of course, finding the right balance for you and your employees depends on your company's values and culture, as well as your employees' acceptance of digital collaboration. Digital communication & collaboration means that all business processes take place exclusively virtually. Working and arranging for projects and files, organizing and planning, as well as sharing information on a regular basis presents you as a business owner with the big challenges: Collaboration, cross-location communication and the security of your data.

The challenge of cooperation

If employees sit alone in front of their work, they run the risk of missing out on important impulses and best practices from other departments. Let's assume that an employee prepares a project in months of detailed work and then discovers that another team has dealt with a very similar topic. Potential synergies remain unused as a result. Nothing annoys employees more than wasted time. In addition, lost business opportunities and duplicated work are significant cost factors for the company.

The new generation of workers has learned how to interact digitally socially and moves naturally in this virtual environment. Bring conversational communication of social
networks to your office. Your employees are adapted to social interaction via Social Digital Platforms and can use collective knowledge company-wide with an enterprise social network.

The challenge of joint communication

According to a report in the management magazine Harvard Business Review, the amount of time managers and employees spend working together has increased by at least 50% in the last 20 years. Workers now spend up to 80% of their time in team meetings, making calls and answering emails. However, modern tools for effective and productive communication are often lacking.

Consider the following scenario: your employees invest a lot of time in drafting a project or presentation - now emails are sent containing different, modified versions of that project. Feedback is exchanged and revisions take longer than if the same employees were on site. You end up with 5 different versions of the project and collect feedback from your staff from the numerous emails. The difficulty now is keeping track of the final versions from all the ideas flowing in. It follows that by sharing email attachments, repeated revisions, or overwritten files, you have a great possibility of error sources for this process. 

For this reason, 66% of SMEs are already planning to switch to a unified collaboration platform next year. Give your employees the opportunity to collaborate in the cloud. Cloud-based apps support seamless collaboration via mobile devices, on the web, or on the desktop. With Word, PowerPoint, or Excel, you can create team documents in an instant, simply in the same version of the file stored in the cloud. Everyone can work on the version, leave comments and feedback, and download the latest version. That way, you're all on the same page from anywhere, at any time. This measure saves you from having to merge multiple versions and from employees being unclear about the current status.