What Is A Collaborative Work Tool?
A cooperative work instrument is a device that rearranges and further develops coordinated efforts among representatives and teammates of a similar organization. Affiliation is cooperating for a typical reason and around shared undertakings. Cooperation instruments consequently work with the sharing of information and the transmission of data. Thus, it makes it conceivable to expand the groups’ efficiency, address the issues experienced inside the work groups more rapidly and effectively, and lift the representatives’ inspiration and innovativeness.
What Is The Purpose Of A Collaborative Work Tool?
A collaborative tool aims to improve work processes and centralize a company’s critical information on a single platform. This information can relate to planning, organization, documentation, or project management. Thus, it allows all company employees to be much more productive and comfortable in how they work.
What Are The Different Collaborative Work Tools?
A collaborative tool aims to improve work processes and centralize a company’s critical information on a single platform. This information can relate to planning, organization, documentation, or project management. Thus, it allows all company employees to be much more productive and comfortable in how they work.
- Collaborative tools for communicating and exchanging information: these tools can make it possible to share agendas or create a standard calendar, transmit documents and share informative content, or even speak in real-time via instant messaging.
- Collaborative tools for monitoring and organizing projects: these tools make it possible to centralize all the information relating to a project. This makes it possible to gain efficiency and productivity and to acquire more flexibility in monitoring and carrying out tasks. Working with this tool makes it possible to reduce the number of extra emails to agree on the project. Everyone knows exactly what to do and when. These tools facilitate planning and provide a clear visualization of the project. Managers can thus better organize work and allocate resources intelligently.
- Collaborative tools to produce documents or lead discussions to facilitate simultaneous work on the same document (text document, spreadsheet, or presentation). They allow you to bring together different types of content in one place. You can even define individual access rights to decide if you want your collaborators to be able to see or modify the documents. With these tools, you can easily find important files and access them anytime. In meetings, these tools are also very suitable for mind mapping, optimizing group reflection, and searching for creative ideas. These tools encourage people to share ideas and participate more actively in a project.
Why Use Collaborative Tools In Business?
Using collaborative tools in your business can benefit you for several reasons. This can allow you to:
- To be more productive. Working with collaborative tools increases the autonomy of employees. They then take the initiative more easily. By offering employees collaborative tools, companies promote a culture of collaboration that makes employees want to surpass themselves in their work. And it is their motivation that is positively impacted. Employees are boosted and much more creative. A group emulation is created. Talents come together better. And the company benefits from all the resources and skills of a team. Group projects are thus better thought out, more original, and better carried out.
- In addition, working with collaborative tools makes it possible to avoid many mishaps, such as finding files or messages, being able to open a document, no longer seeing backups, or noticing that modifications still need to be taken into account. Account. All this is no longer necessary with a collaborative tool that ensures all files are present and all changes have been considered.
- Accelerate decision-making. Collaborative tools make it possible to manage a project more quickly. Employees can exchange information in real time without necessarily having to be in the same place. With collaborative writing tools, collaborators can view and edit documents from anywhere.
- All these exchanges facilitate the emergence of ideas and personal and teamwork and then greatly simplify decision-making.
- To federate the teams. Collaborative tools facilitate the federation and collaboration of groups, especially when people do not work on the same site or remotely. Collaborative tools improve employees’ cohesion and sense of belonging to the company. They make it possible to create a shared space that facilitates exchanges between the teams. Collaborative tools are perfect vectors for strengthening groups and bringing them together around a common objective.
- To improve remote work. Lately, remote work (partial telework or not, business trips, nomadism, etc.) has developed a lot. Employees are four times more likely to work in mobility than ten years ago. But remotely, it quickly becomes difficult to monitor the progress of projects, to know who is in charge of what, which tasks are in progress, and which are priorities. In this reasonably new dynamic, collaborative tools then become essential. They make it possible to centralize all the information of a project and make it accessible to everyone within the company. Teams can thus communicate and collaborate anytime, anywhere, and this, via many tools such as, for example,
How To Develop Collaborative Work In The Business?
Collaborating can be very profitable for a company. But how to develop collaborative work, and what actions to implement?
- You, as a manager, can foster collaboration on many pillars. In particular, you can try to:
- Promote the flow and exchange of information: you can promote transparency by sharing all information. And you can then help yourself with collaborative tools. You can also encourage everyone to speak up. Once again, a collaborative tool can help promote the timidest to express themselves. Also, eradicate information silos, that is, groups that do not communicate enough and do not share information optimally enough with other groups. As information silos, we can cite as a typical example the mailboxes that constitute a significant source of non-shared information.
- Put the collective at the heart of your strategy: value collective performance by setting up collective rewards (such as a bonus) to reward collaborative efforts. Also, simplify internal mobility by promoting the change of position or team to feed other modes of operation and thinking.
- Inspire an atmosphere of collaboration: the most important thing is that you manage to create an atmosphere of cooperation. To help you in this task, adopt more collaborative tools. This will allow you to promote exchanges via instant messaging rather than emails, share all the documentation on a standard directory, and work in real time on online documents.
Promoting collaboration also involves the work environment you offer your employees. Try to provide your employees with various spaces, such as:
- Informal relaxation areas are sources of various discussions that can free ideas.
- Informal relaxation areas are sources of various discussions that can free ideas.
- Open office spaces (open-space) promote proximity, communication, and friendliness, establish a collaboration climate, and therefore be sources of spontaneous ideas.
- Pleasant places for breaks to promote interactions between colleagues, conviviality, and moments of socialization and interaction.
Here are some practices that will allow you to establish a collaborative work environment within your company gradually.
Use Of Collaborative Tools: Is It Secure?
Shared workspaces are secure to protect your content and documents. All your data, documents, and workspaces are shared and hosted in the cloud. So you can find them anytime from anywhere.
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