Connecting The Remote Workforce With Collaboration Tools

With all the change going on in the world today, companies have to take a good look at the programs and tools that support their workforce. We all are now recognizing that it can be a challenge to keep teams connected and maintain productivity.

Over my 15 years working with enterprise companies to build communication tools, I have used my fair share of solutions. I would like to quickly share a few ideas that will help you provide your employees with an easy way to communicate and stay connected.

There are a lot of options out there for you to stay connected such as online community platforms, social intranet, chat, video conferencing, and document collaboration.

The one we will focus on today is the concept of a social intranet. This is a purpose-built internal solution that acts as your corporate intranet, or Intranet 2.0.

So how can an organization and its workforce benefit from incorporating social intranet into their work-life?

Social Intranet – Ultimate Collaboration Tool in Digital Age

The big difference between a traditional intranet and a social intranet is the ability to connect directly with other employees via discussions and private messaging.

A social intranet assimilates best practices of social media platforms, team sites, portals and formulates a place that offers feasible collaboration, self-generated content, and liberty to communicate.

It results in increased productivity, mutual sharing of knowledge and ideas, driving efficiency, enabling a self-service approach to finding answers to problems, and truncating the risk of employees acting upon outdated information.

Key Factors for Building an Internal Community

Some key factors to consider when looking at building an internal community are what do you want your members to do and what do they need to do for productivity.

Start with one use case such as internal communication or product development. From there start to layer on the other teams in your organization to your community platform.

Social Tools – Quintessential Way to Interact

Social tools that include Org charts provide users the ability to find the right person and a direct way to communicate with each other.

This can be an amazing value for your organization. Another thing to look out for is a good community solution that will also have out-of-the-box connections and integrations into other tools your organization might use. One example would be G-suite for docs and calendaring or Jira for bug tracking.

These days it seems like there is a new solution out every day, but some of the veterans are still holding strong. Solutions like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google sites, and Facebook workspaces can build effective collaboration environments.

The rise of cloud solutions like Lumapps, Happeo, and Simpler make great solutions with out-of-the-box integrations. Keep an eye out for a review coming soon.

Wrapping Up

No matter where you are on the community journey, the key principles of community building still apply. Try to focus on content, UI, and building relationships. By using these tools your employees will be better connected. Till next time, if you have any questions or need any help I would love to hear from you. Ask any question on Twitter @jvsummers or on LinkedIn @JohnSummers

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