[HR article] Avoid drowning in online workplace collaboration
Article by: Suresh Sambandam is the CEO of Kissflow, the first unified digital workplace platform for organizations to manage all of their work.
It’s no secret that the Covid-19 pandemic was the catalyst for millions of employees moving to remote work over the last year. Now, however, as we have lived in this workplace experiment for many months, the limitations (and benefits) of remote work have become clear.
For one, we’ve seen the trend of business leaders overcompensating for the isolation and decreased visibility across teams — unfortunate trends that stem from popular remote models with too many online “collaboration” tools. As a result, employees are swimming in a sea of distractions, communicating with co-workers across multiple applications from Slack to Box to Google Workplace and everything in between. There’s a lot of communication but no real collaboration.
However, as remote work and hybrid models are becoming a more permanent fixture for so many organizations even beyond the pandemic, business leaders have been forced to reevaluate the efficacy of the workplace tools they implemented at the beginning of the pandemic.
In those early stages, leaders may have adopted software marketed as collaboration tools as a desperate attempt to keep teams connected. Now, though, many are realizing that having so many tools across platforms actually does more harm than good by overloading team members, preventing productivity and costing a lot of money that impacts bottom lines. We found that employees are also seeing the effects, with nearly half of North American workers surveyed confirming that more tools complicate their work lives. Instead of those tools, leaders must now look for solutions.
Conduct An Audit
Today’s organizations across in-person, hybrid and remote jobs are using many tools to communicate, but is true collaboration happening alongside that communication? There’s a difference. In order to realize collaboration that improves productivity, business leaders need to first do an audit of all the tools they currently use. What purposes are you using your tools for? Which ones are the most successful? Which ones can be removed with little impact on your employees’ day-to-day?
Once those questions are answered, consider where the gaps are. You may have tools for file sharing, chat/instant message and workflow, but does your team need tools for anything else? Would one solution for project management help teams be more productive?
Build A Lean Suite
Once it’s determined what your employees need to do their work, consider the number of tools you’re introducing. Right now, there’s no one-size-fits-all rule for online collaboration tools because there are just too many options.
Neil Miller, the host of The Digital Workplace podcast, stated: “You need to build a suite of tools to handle all your use cases. But build the smallest suite necessary. Most organizations are over-using collaboration software. They end up with a lot of feature overlap. You are forced to check five different systems to make sure you are not missing out.”
To address this cognitive overload, Miller suggested sticking with “fewer tools that do the job well enough. Someone is going to miss out on their favorite tool, but it’s a necessary move.” However, he does say to be flexible with tools that enable job functions.
“Designers and engineers may need collaboration tools that are much more advanced than everyone else,” he wrote. “Set clear boundaries on when the specialty tools are used and who needs access.”
Choose Digital Options That Reflect The Skill Set Of The People Managing Them
In larger, more traditional organizations, IT professionals typically have ownership of decisions and management of tools. However, the tides are changing — especially in a hybrid world.
With this shift in responsibilities, less IT-savvy decision-makers might be overcomplicating the tech buying process for themselves by choosing tools that require greater knowledge to set up and manage. Instead, consider exploring low-code or no-code collaboration solutions that require little to no programming skill sets. This could make the management process easier and help increase productivity across the board.
Make A Culture Commitment To True Collaboration
Choosing and managing technology that fosters collaboration is no easy feat, but it’s a necessary one—especially as our working world becomes more and more reliant on hybrid and remote models. As companies start to return to their “new normal” post-Covid-19, this is a perfect time to reset, reevaluate and recommit to making sure that employees have the right tools (though not too many tools) and that the emphasis on making these tools work permeates throughout the organization.