Collaboration is key to building a team that pushes your company through challenges and beyond the competition. When people are told to work collectively with their peers on a task or project, they stay focused 64% longer and end up more productive and feeling better engaged than those who work primarily alone.
But collaborating and being productive has become both easier and harder. We all primarily work online, whether we’re in the office or not. This makes it really easy to simultaneously work on documents and files. However, we’re also majorly distracted and it’s easy to stick to ourselves instead of include the help and input of others that used to be more frequently necessary.
We’re missing out on prime opportunities to use our collective knowledge for new ideas and faster solutions to problems. Your team needs to take the online work experience and make it collaborative to be both more productive and innovative.
Taking team collaboration online eliminates a lot of the barriers to innovation and productivity
Collaborating online eliminates bias:
Many team members report feeling some level of bias during meetings, teamwork, or brainstorming. It’s just a natural development when you put together certain personalities and give titles. Unfortunately, it can cause others to share less and suppress all of your team’s potential. Collaborating online helps to eliminate that. Think of how “open” we’ve become over online communication thanks to a screen. The same happens with collaboration. It’s easier for those with less persistent personalities to share ideas using online collaboration forums like company chat. Everyone’s ideas “get heard” because they are in a trackable stream. Hibox is a perfect company chat tool for brainstorming because you can organize by stream to keep the conversation organized.
Flatten communication levels by collaborating online:
Collaborating online also eliminates any organizational barriers to collaboration. Organizational layers limit communication and make it difficult to make quick decisions companies need to in order to stay ahead. For a clear forward strategy, all areas and levels of a company should be working together. Most companies are organized in a way that silos departments who need to be working together. Teams need faster collaboration. Online collaboration using tools like Hibox connects anyone from anywhere in the company to share ideas, come up with solutions, and make fast decisions. In Hibox, you can make streams and invite anyone from anywhere in the company to join and collaborate together in one “virtual” place. Managers don’t need to be messengers. Team members can even direct message anyone else for quick responses to important questions so things can overall get done faster. Company chat turns the grape vine into a functioning network, as it should be.
Minimize the risk of losing information and making mistakes:
Confusion is easy when everyone has a hand in while collaborating. Without an organized, efficient way of working together online, it can be a mess. Between in person meetings, disorganized email threads, and files floating around, it’s impossible to keep things straight. Information gets lost and big mistakes can be easily made. By moving collaboration online, you simplify the whole process and make sure that important information is safe where everyone can find it. You can also scroll back on Hibox company chat and see exactly what was said in your chat streams. Nothing gets lost or unnoticed like in email threads. Hibox streams allow file sharing so everyone always has the most recent versions of your files instead of multiple versions being sent around. You can quote and tag messages with hashtags to later search and find information all in one place. Brainstorming and collaborating on work is much more organized and actionable when you centralize information and communication.
Bring more minds together no matter where they are:
As with anything online, the beauty of online collaboration is that anyone can participate from anywhere. Once you move your team’s communication and brainstorming online, you can have anyone join the conversation. It’s no longer limited to just the office. You can bring people from other departments and offices into your projects for better, more diverse perspectives. Working and collaborating with the same people can be limiting. Groupthink and routines can make new ideas stale and blind your team to possible solutions. By bringing in new perspectives online, you can help inspire new ideas and more productive work. Team members will be more engaged with new perspectives and voices. Using Hibox, you can even host group video calls to collaborate together face to face with anyone.
Make individual work more productive by collaborating online:
Group work aside, collaborating online actually makes individual work more productive. Employees who work alone on their delegated tasks can get bored with work and become less engaged. Less engaged employees are less productive. By incorporating online collaboration, employees are more motivated to stay on track and held accountable as they’re part of a group effort. Mixing up work with collaboration helps employees feel their work is varied and more interesting. Employees feel they have more creative freedom over direction if they are part of the collaboration process instead of just delegated work. Involve all team members via chat streams in Hibox to boost employee engagement and productivity.
Eliminate barriers to great ideas and productive work by moving your team’s collaboration online. Hibox is the perfect tool that covers everything you need to collaboration and communication efficiently. Try Hibox for free with your team today.
