Good teamwork is an essential element of success for any business.
How a company invests in connecting its employees and allowing individual creativity to foster innovative group solutions should be a primary focus for management. However, this process isn’t solely about ensuring employees can communicate effectively. It is also about something else just as fundamentally important: opportunities to collaborate.
When workers have the chance to collaborate freely, and when new ideas arise, unique and innovative solutions are often the result. With today’s office growing more fractured with the rise in remote work and international teams, how can a business continue to encourage working together? Understanding why investing in better collaborative tools matters is the first step to answering that question.
Why Collaboration Matters in Any Office
Is a lack of collaborative opportunities indeed so much of a problem because of remote work? Yes, according to research published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behavior. When the pandemic struck, and the major shift to remote work began, teams studied at Microsoft became less collaborative and connected. Fewer people spoke to each other in real-time, and work quality had the potential to suffer as a result.
Collaboration enables employees to do more than accomplish a task faster by working together, although that is a clear benefit. It also offers the chance for diverse viewpoints to come together in an effort to find better, more efficient ways to solve a problem. Ultimately, someone else’s perspective could be the key to sparking an insight that leads to better results.
Collaborative efforts also help to boost feelings of involvement and job satisfaction. Engaging directly with one’s coworkers in productive efforts can be an essential element of employee happiness. Maintaining these connective bonds has become more challenging, with offices growing more distant and incorporating more remote workers.
Virtual Connections Are Essential in Remote and Hybrid Offices
While remote workers bring their own benefits to the table, it is vital to maintain a cohesive connection to the rest of their team, such as those in the office. Enabling remote teams to work together seamlessly with their in-office counterparts is an essential part of making work-from-home solutions both individually fulfilling and organizationally successful.
Video chat has been an integral element of such strategies. In one study conducted by Forbes, more than three-quarters of respondents said video conferencing was “significantly more effective” than audio-only calls. By keeping teams engaged with one another, information continues to flow freely between employees, and you can minimize the effects of distance. However, chatting face to face is just one element to address.
Making Document Collaboration a Part of Daily Workflows
Did you know the humble PDF file could be a vehicle for making remote workers even more effective? Today, this format has capabilities that extend far beyond basic document display, incorporating advanced technology such as encryption, redaction, and more. Perhaps most importantly, leading PDF software solutions can enable real-time work on the same document like many cloud services.
For example, Kofax Power PDF enables users sharing a network (such as through a VPN connection to a company’s servers) to open and work on the same document. Changes, markup, notes and more are all visible as soon as any user adds content. Not only is this functionality excellent for those in the office, it means those outside the office can continue to work as if they were just a few desks away.
Collaborative tools and good communication are the driving forces creating the office of tomorrow. By emphasizing the importance of connecting teams together and then giving them the tools to do so, it is possible to forge a path that leads to the workforce of tomorrow.
