Today’s workforce is spread across more locations than ever before: 37 percent of workers telecommuted to some degree in 2015. Companies occupy multiple locations, and business partnerships span the globe. In addition to physical separation, teams in the same company are separated by projects and departments. These barriers unfortunately lead to communication silos, furthering separation and limiting teamwork and collaboration. The right collaboration tools can help reduce barriers to communication, provide better access to resources and help teams be more productive.
Silos can have a significant (and detrimental) effect on your business. They create barriers between teams, often disrupting communications across your entire organization. But that’s not all. Let’s look at the wider impact silos can have across your company.
Here’s how you can harness communication tools to break down these silos and enable employees to share ideas like never before.
Sharing files should be seamless between teams, tools, devices and departments. A platform or suite of well-integrated tools will allow clear connections between people, content and business apps across the organization. As a part of such a suite, team sites can help employees collaborate on documents, store information and manage projects. This will allow for cross-team, real-time document sharing and editing to support collaboration on several levels, while providing one easy place to find it all.
To improve productivity, team sites should be accessible from virtually anywhere, making information securely available and enabling collaboration across distances and from mobile devices.
Teams that don’t interact on a regular basis are often unaware of what the other is working on. Enterprise social networks built for cross-organization communication can help break down these silos and walls. Employees can create cross-company and cross-department groups on topics of shared interest, successes and learnings to solve problems or crowdsource ideas.
Organizations also often face management and executive silos, created by organizational hierarchy, internal communication practices and company culture. These hierarchical barriers can be broken down by creating groups within team-based communication tools to empower employees to engage in two-way conversations with executives.
Easily accessible communication tools, such as IM, voice calls and video conferencing, give employees multiple ways to reach out to their peers. If they are allowed to choose their method of communication—and can connect with peers from nearly anywhere—employees are more likely to reach out and build stronger interpersonal relationships.
Collaboration tools can help teams be more productive.
Get in touch with eMazzanti today to find out more about collaboration tools.
used with permission from Microsoft Office Blogs
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