How Can Online Collaboration Tools Lead to Productive Teamwork

How Can Online Collaboration Tools Lead to Productive Teamwork? I think a good first step is a bit of knowledge about one or more of these products, which will make it easier to communicate with other team members. I’m going to give a brief overview of three big categories of collaboration tools: Project Management Systems, Webconferencing Tools, and Instant Messaging Tools.

Online collaboration tools are the secret sauce for streamlining team communication, improving efficiency, and helping project teams become more productive. There are many options available—so which ones do you need to make teamwork on your next project a seamless process?

Increase communication

Online collaboration offers organizations a chance to achieve optimal communication among team members during projects. Collaborating online provides more spaces where teams can communicate. Many tools offer virtual chat rooms, video calls and online meetings to keep a project organized and on schedule.

Privacy features are one of the online collaboration tools that will appeal to organizations. Teams inevitably communicate across a wide range of online functions. Certain online tools ensure that only the necessary personnel are capable of joining these channels. Online collaboration tools give access points beyond an office or home. Members of a team can bounce ideas off one another from mobile locations as well. This keeps everyone on a project connected and builds efficiency.

Maximize creative efforts

Expand creative output and promote overall team input with the ability to share files. Online collaboration tools give team members the capability of sharing unique, digital files by reviewing a document together or sharing an online workspace. Use these resources to give your teams a chance to build off each other’s creativity. This type of climate not only pushes the limits of an organization’s creativity but enhances productivity and efficiency as well.

When a team is given opportunities to create in settings conducive to creativity, the resulting projects reflect it. It’s not enough to share feedback and ideas through email or other limited settings. Instead, teams need to be connected in real time to effectively boost each other’s potential for creative output.

Online collaboration tools such as Dropbox offer sharing and scheduling features. Dropbox is one of the most popular online collaboration tools due to the fact it meets a lot of the storage needs of modern organizations. Exploit the powerful collaboration possibilities that tools like Dropbox offers to empower teams and bolster creativity and performance.

Fosters Innovation

Innovation is one of those buzzwords that fly around business environments from time to time. Of course, who wouldn’t want to be innovative? But there’s a big difference between giving a concept lip-service and actively promoting it in your organization. Do you know how to support innovation? That’s right, embracing project collaboration.

Ideas need to be free. That sounds like a lofty statement, but it applies to the practice world of project managements. New ideas can come and go, but if you’re not sharing them with your team, and your team isn’t communicating them amongst themselves, then those ideas wither away and die. When you’re collaborating, though, ideas have a chance to pollinate across many teams, leading to further insights that might otherwise have been missed if they hadn’t been freely shared.

 Increased Transparency

What is project collaboration? One thing, it’s a way to increase transparency in an organization. A project can’t be a silo, where you don’t know what the team is doing or the stakeholder is in the dark. This is an invitation for disaster. Team members need direction and stakeholders should be kept in the loop.

With collaboration software, there’s transparency. Everyone knows what everyone else is working on. They can comment on that work, ask questions, which, as noted above, is super-important. Transparency means that people can see the contributions of others and how that ties into their work.

Working across teams, with people collaboratively sharing, you’re able to integrate when you can, which eliminates redundancies and leads to greater efficiency and productivity. Now you’re no longer wasting valuable resources by having people works on the same tasks or competing tasks between departments.

Utilize modern file sharing

File storage functions create opportunities for teams to work together in a streamlined environment. Online collaboration tools provide file storage in a shared database. Constant access to the library of files enables teams to thrive. This type of blanket connection naturally creates efficient projects. Teams can quickly receive ideas from text, images, or videos and work together to take the necessary steps with the data.

Online collaboration creates clear potential for greatness in an organization. Administrators see the power it has on the teams they monitor and are beginning to employ it. Stay ahead of the curve by understanding the benefits of online collaboration.

Management of data storage for online collaboration is optimized with a digital asset management system. Boost the connectivity of a team to produce highly professional projects consistently with online collaboration and create a productive environment for your next project.

It’s Fun!

Having fun is not exactly the number-one motivation at work, but it sure makes doing the job a lot more pleasant. When you’re using a collaborative tool, you’re creating an informal culture that allows for a more casual approach.

Teams are chatting on a platform more akin to social media, so they’re freer to speak their minds about the project, evens inject some humor and needed personality into workplace interactions. While some might think this creates a slacker culture, in fact what it does is create community. You’re building a tighter team and boosting morale, which will lead to great employee retainment.

 Improves Efficiency:

“Why was the report not finished?”

“I needed some data from Mr. A. I sent across a mail for the same to him. But I never got the reply”

Situations like these are common in today’s workplace. A collaboration software helps cut out all these inefficiencies by reducing the delays that happen due to email overlook (in the software, you just need to assign that task), helps people in asking questions related to the task using the commenting feature, employees don’t have to look for documents all over the place, eliminates the need for everyone to be at the same place at the same time and so on.

Integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox and the like also help speed up things. If some processes are meant to be followed repeatedly, templates could be made or tasks could be set on repeat basis.

Clear schedules in a collaboration software helps employees properly plan their work and thus help meet deadlines more often than not.

 Allows You to View and Maintain Employee Workloads:

As a manager, you have a lot many things to handle. Supposing a new project comes up. Now, you don’t have the time to go and ask every employee about their current workloads, about their ongoing projects. Thus assigning further responsibilities without that information could lead to inequitable workloads and unnecessary work pressure on some employees.

With a collaboration software, you can easily view every employee’s workloads. It might happen that while software developer A is working on three ongoing projects, software developer B is handling just 1 project. Looking at all this on your screen, you can assign further equitable workloads.

A collaboration software also helps you in knowing your future recruiting needs. Especially if you feel like some employee’s workload is too much and there’s no possible way they would be able to handle future projects simultaneously.

 Enable Remote Workers Participation:

Remote working is one of the growing employment trends in the business world, states a study by The New York Times. If anything, the remote workforce is only there to increase. More and more people are choosing to work from home or looking for employment opportunities where they could work from home 1-2 days in a week.

Instead of giving them individual tasks and letting them work in silos, make them feel a part of the team by inviting them to the software. They can easily see the progress of the project/tasks, the members working on it, the reviews and comments made by users and so on at their convenient time and location.

 Improves Employee Engagement:

According to The Muse, 70% of U.S. workers are not engaged at work which means if as a company, you are not working to improve employee engagement, your business could be at a risk.

Improving teamwork at the workplace is one way to get workers engaged. And so, providing them with the tool to inculcate better work relationships is one step towards that goal. And what’s more, if your workforce is better engaged, project performance will understandably be more efficient.

Improves Productivity:

A study done by McKinsey and Company found that implementing collaborative processes and networking tools improved productivity by 20-30% in software development teams.

Individual tasks can be done with greater speed as employees don’t have to waste time searching for information or waiting for bureaucratic permissions to arrive. This further helps employees finish their work in less time and in a better way, all helping build productivity and engagement.

After all, teams with engaged employees are 21% more productive than those with low engagement.

Conclusion

The online collaboration tools for team members gives it a complete package of features which can help them collaborate effectively with their team members. Some features include: 1) Know who is working on what, 2) Having the ability to assign tasks based on skill sets and 3) Be able to see your work from different perspectives, 4) Complete integration with the Office suite so as to facilitate easy interaction between Microsoft Excel and Outlook