In today’s digitally-enabled workplace, employees and teams use a variety of collaboration tools to accomplish a single task.
Those employees—especially if some are remote or travel often—might use a combination of email, IM, web calls, and meeting schedulers to coordinate with team members.
Download this white paper on maximizing business efficiency by adopting a unified collaboration platform.
If all those tools don’t work together in a single solution, collaboration can turn into a real mess, with team members missing important meetings, doing redundant work, or struggling to communicate with each other in a timely manner.
Choosing a unified collaboration solution that avoids those issues will position you for maximum team productivity and success.
Achieve Your Organizational Goals through Unified Collaboration
Chances are your company already has the framework in place for successful unified collaboration. For example, the Microsoft stack includes standard and familiar tools such as email, calendars, and instant messaging, as well as collaboration applications such as Skype for Business and SharePoint.
In addition, there are opportunities to incorporate other third-party applications such as Slack, Zoom, Adobe, and Citrix into your existing unified collaboration platform. But the process of customizing all these solutions so they work together in the way your organization needs them to can be overwhelming.
Here are some goals to keep in mind when choosing a unified collaboration solution.
- Building a more connected organization. Today’s workplace includes double the number of teams as compared to five years ago, and the number of people working remotely has quadrupled over the past decade. This combination makes connectivity between employees more important than ever. A web-based video conferencing application can bring all your remote employees together in real time, no matter how many of them there are. And real-time content sharing and editing tools allow remote employees to collaborate as if they were in the same room.
- Driving innovation and learning. The right unified collaboration solution will help your employees make more efficient use of their time and be more productive, which creates more time for innovation and creative problem-solving. Collaboration solutions that reduce or remove repetitive tasks and help employees prioritize tasks that are most important will help your organization reach desired outcomes faster. Solutions that facilitate spontaneous, real-time conversations between employees—whether they are in the same place or not—increase the easy sharing of information, best practices, and lessons learned across your organization.
- Increasing employee engagement and satisfaction. The digital revolution has transformed people’s personal lives and it should be transforming their professional lives as well. But that transformation is not as quick as some employees would like. Consider this: 50 percent of the workforce will be comprised of Millennials by 2020. These digital natives expect their workplace technology to mirror the personal technology they are used to. Tools that allow employees to connect their own devices to enterprise systems or solutions that improve flexibility and mobility for employees will keep them happier and more engaged with your organization. And that means they will be happier and more engaged when interacting with your customers and clients as well
Choosing the Right Unified Collaboration Tools
Unified collaboration solutions used to be nice to have, but they are now must-have. To better meet that need, AVI Systems recently partnered with Magenium, a full-service Microsoft provider, to expand the portfolio of unified collaboration offerings available to users.
If you’re ready to learn more about expanding or improving your unified collaboration technology, the Unified Communications: Magnifying Business Efficiency white paper is a great place to start.
