Why is it so difficult to make chat work in our businesses and what can we do to fix it?
The workplace has officially gone social and it’s forever changed how we work.
In some ways, it’s been positive: tools like chat and videoconferencing improved the way we connect and collaborate with coworkers in the office and around the world. Finally, the way we have conversations naturally in person is digital, worldwide, and recordable.
However, the work chat “anti-hype” is growing. Chat is turning out to be more of a distraction (even addiction) at work. We talk but don’t plan and execute. We’re more connected, but less productive. The number of chat “break-up” articles are increasing, people are quitting Slack “cold turkey”, more complaints about decreased productivity and lack of “deep work”, or even (god forbid) companies returning to email.
Business chat is here to stay. It’s the future of workplace communication
But we need to do something more to harness the positive aspects and more to diminish the negatives. We don’t need to quit chat, we need to build on where chat is taking us. Why is it so difficult to make chat work in our businesses and what can we do to fix it?
Enter, us.
How we became obsessed with communication and productivity
Our journey starts three years ago in Latin America, where we were managing a remote team of 40+ programmers building online banking solutions for BBVA and other financial institutions. Our team had no central office and no way to easily interact as a team to share information, manage tasks and execute projects. We needed an easy to use tool to help us collaborate and allow our small team to keep pace with clients’ tight deadlines.
“Our team experienced first-hand the challenges of running a dynamic team with members spread out over different countries and time zones. We built Hibox as a tool that delivers company information instantly and organizes our work into tasks so everyone knows what needs to get done and when. And we designed it for businesses of all shapes and sizes, not just tech-savvy startups.” — Spencer Coon, COO and co-founder of Hibox.
Our result: group chat, task management, videoconferencing all in one tool
Hibox solves the three main pain points when collaborating with your teams with: 1) Faster, more organized communication (team messaging), 2) Keeping better track of tasks and projects (task management) and 3) live discussions for remote teams and between different offices (videoconferencing).
There’s no need to search for 3–4 different tools, trying to your whole team setup and logged into 3–4 different platforms to have all the capabilities you need. You don’t have to integrate and constantly be jumping between tools with different designs and usability to make working together as productive as possible.
Now over 10,000 teams from 22 countries have found their productivity solution with Hibox. Another 1,000 new teams a month are joining them. Chat was just the beginning of better communication, Hibox is the evolution to next-generation collaboration.
Improved business team chat
The company-wide Public Stream is where you can all brainstorm ideas or organize Friday’s happy hour — whether you’re sitting across the hall or on different sides of the country. It’s like the virtual water cooler. Go ahead and like messages, add emojis or GIFs (seems trivial, but makes your workplace communication so much more enjoyable).
Here is where your company bonds as a team, no matter where you are. In Hibox you can organize by location, business area or project with “streams”. Streams are collaborative spaces that are more than just a simple chat.
Make things happen with built-in task management
Chat is nice but chat is not the solution to greater productivity. Now that we’ve made it easier to talk about things together, we need to make it easier to work on things together. In fact, many teams have experienced decreased productivity as a result of chat. We changed this by bringing built-in task management to chat streams.
Finally, you can turn all that conversation into concrete, actionable tasks. Harness your team’s creativity and convert into tangible results your team can keep track of in real-time. Create and assign tasks in streams and assign to specific users to make sure things get done. Filter task lists so you know what’s complete, who’s assigned to what, and what there is to do next.
Have face-to-face meetings right in Hibox
Isn’t it annoying when you want to have a conversation with your team and can’t get everyone logged into another platform like Skype or Hangouts? With Hibox having a face-to-face discussion with your whole team is instant and just one click away with fully-integrated videoconferencing. You don’t ever have to leave your platform. Remote workers, you’re able to have real conversations with coworkers like you were in the office. No one is ever too far away.
Game-changing artificial intelligence tools
And we’re not stopping there. We’re using Artificial Intelligence to learn from your behavior and the information you’re sharing to help with daily tasks.
For Example, Auto Task Recognition. If you’re writing a message and it sounds like it should be a task, Hibox will ask you if you want to create one automatically. Anyone tagged in the message and any time/date recognized will be instantly assigned to the task as well. This saves you plenty of extra steps. If you mention a specific file, it will even give you the most recent version. These features are only the beginning.
There are dozens of features in testing such as using its AI assistant to analyze employees’ current workload and automatically assign tasks to best users. Hibox will detect which users are the best choice for a certain task based on skills and past performance. It will even predict how long a project will take to complete given a user’s current assignments and its requirements. Additionally, Hibox will automatically schedule meetings by cross-referencing calendars with the others and suggest the best time and place.
With features like these, we have transformed a simple chat into the ultimate productivity tool.
Yes, you can still get all the integrations you need
Don’t worry – Hibox still lets you use all the tools you already love. Integrate all your team’s pre-existing Google Drive, Dropbox, and email accounts to easily share anything. Coming soon, you’ll be able to keep your task list synced with your calendars so nothing goes missed. Quickbooks and Salesforce will be available to track financials and stay on top of leads faster without leaving Hibox.
There’s much more to come
We created Hibox with the goal of making team chat productive. Now we’re continuously coming up with new ways to give your team the best collaboration experience possible.
We’re the newest expats in town at our European HQ: multicultural talent bed and business tourism hotspot, Barcelona, Spain.
We’re already making appearances on the European scene:
When you’re in town for the next world conference or you want to drop by for tapas, come say hi.
In Closing…
We hope your team finds your digital workplace here so you can be the most productive you’ve ever been. Sign up you and your team for free at hibox.co to start chatting, collaborating, and building together.
-The Hibox Team
