Are you planning a project? Do you have a team of people working for a common goal? This blog post will help you to understand how an online collaboration tool helps you to centralize the project communication, improve information exchange and increase efficiency.
What is collaboration?
A working practise whereby individuals work together to a common purpose to achieve business benefit. Collaboration enables individuals to work together to achieve a defined and common business purpose.
What is a collaboration tool?
We in Hailer think that collaboration tools make online teamwork easier, faster and Funnier. A good collaboration tool helps to enga
ge your team and crystalize the common goals. (feel free to disagree)
Is your stuff disconnected? Don't worry. Keep reading.
Main parts of today's and future’s work happen online and managing data in its different forms and efficient communication via these new tools become more significant. the collaboration platforms or project management tools play a major role.
The common challenge seems to be that companies take into use multiple tools for different purposes. They have a static cloud-based service for sharing files, e-mail as a communication tool towards external partners, chat for internal communication and a process management tool to track the project. And in addition, maybe a social platform which is totally disconnected from the processes and lacks the business context. The multiple tools can obviously be costly and complex.
Finding the needed information from different tools and the related discussion takes unnecessary time and causes frustration in the team members. Already in 2012, MGI reported that improved communication and collaboration could improve the productivity of interaction. But the more and more fragmented communication is getting stressfull and complicated to follow, we discussed more this in an earlier blog post.
Avoid silos!
Traditional team sites are often built on the basis of organizational structure. This can make the information hard to discover. The pitfalls of organizational silos happen also in these traditional team platforms. What happens in silos that the departments are communicating and collaborating only inside their own.
Quite many of us know what is not working, so let’s focus on the bright side:
Online collaboration tools
New era online collaboration tools can make a great difference to any project team. Let’s have a look at the five benefits:
- Centralized and more structured communication
- Improved information flow, including files and projects updates
- Access to earlier messages and decisions reduces miscommunication
- More efficient handoffs and structured feedback
- Clear insight into the project’s progress
Centralized and structured communication
This means that written communication sticks in the right context. We want to store project-related discussions and decisions that follow. Hailer enables in-activity messenger, which collects the communication and keeps it in the right context. It is possible to invite external partners into the same project when needed. It is like inbuilt WhatsApp or Slack. People can join the project and see all earlier discussions or attached files and links. Read more!
Improve the information flow
This sounds easy… send more messages right? In more channels right? Make a post in the social platform, store the docs in cloud, add the link and news to the intranet, send an email, do not forget slack. The message is lost and the document is hard to find.
In modern collaboration software, you should be able to centralize the messages and documents. In Hailer, you can use the global search to find important activities or projects. Once you find it the all related information is in the same place; communication, files and progress. Read more about the four different information flow levels in Hailer.
Access to earlier messages
We all have been here, either as a responsible for the onboarding or as the new guy. You try to pass on the relevant information related to the ongoing project. The messages are a crucial part of human interaction. What has been agreed, why and how? What are the next steps, who has the ball? You cannot improve
When you invite or the new guy joins to a Hailer activity they can immediately see all earlier discussions, shared links, the current stage of the project, files. All the stuff they need to formulate an understanding of what is going on and what needs to be done next.
Structured feedback
Companies want to be better, faster, bigger.. How can we improve? Learning from the past is quite important. Ken Blanchard said that “Feedback is the breakfast for champions”. We need feedback to improve, to perform better next time. When you have established an open atmosphere where your team gives and listens to feedback, it builds up the trust, engages, and motivates. A collaboration platform where the communication flows smoothly can help to build this open atmosphere. In Hailer Feed you can share and like news, publish decisions and get and give feedback. Read how feedback is related to successfull knowledge management.
Clear insight on the progress
Who has the ball? What are the next steps? Effective project or task management needs regular follow up and clear responsibilities. Modern collaboration tool gives you a helicopter view of the progress. Clear task assignment and the calendar view help to stay on top of things. Hailer is customizable and can be tailored to suit any process or projects.
Your project can be arranging an event, a strategic development or a kick-ass birthday party for your kid. Whatever it is Hailer will keep your important stuff organized.
Oh, because many cannot live without: The kanban view is coming in 2019!
See how easy it is to start managing your tasks in Hailer.
