Remote employees face certain challenges when collaborating with coworkers in the main office.
But there’s a big difference between having a few people work from home and having most of your staff spread across different worksites. These aren’t remote workers in the usual sense, but they’re working in a separate environment from the corporate office.
For example, a government contractor with a staff of 300 people might have only 30 employees in the corporate office, while the rest work full-time on site.
When your workforce is scattered across different locations, how do you foster collaboration and innovation, while improving efficiency and productivity?
Professional services firms with a distributed workforce need good collaboration systems in place for a variety of activities, from creating proposals and managing the sales process to tracking employee time. If your company is selling a service repeatedly, you’re accumulating important knowledge about that process, but capturing that information and getting it to a distributed staff is often a challenge.
Here are three common obstacles that come into play, and tips for improving the collaborative environment:
- Poor access to corporate systems: When you have employees at various locations, such as contractors working on a customer site, they often lack easy access to the corporate network, collaboration platform and content. In addition, these alternate work sites may have developed their own culture of workarounds and shadow IT, rather than always going to the organization’s central intranet or repository to look for information and processes.To solve this problem, start by mapping the collaborative environment to fit your organization and work structure. Let’s say your professional services organization has five areas of focus, each managed by a vice president. A traditional corporate intranet would present information solely based on those areas of focus, even though professional services organizations tend to be project-based, with activities that regularly span two or more of your areas of focus.One solution is to configure a collaboration environment based around projects, not functions. To help people at various locations collaborate on projects, the collaboration platform should reflect how people actually work, rather than your organizational hierarchy.
- Information isn’t consistently maintained: Employee collaboration across locations starts to break down when you fail to maintain the relationship between employees and information.For example, if you launch a corporate intranet that looks great and offers important information one month, but don’t update it for two months, people lose trust in it as a source of reliable, up-to-date information. Outdated information reduces the site’s value as a collaboration tool, and employees must find other ways to do their jobs.Consistent knowledge management is often a challenge in client-driven organizations, such as professional services firms. When your work revolves around specific clients and projects, there’s little time and few resources left for overhead activities like knowledge management across the organization. The problem is that your business development and delivery processes soon drift out of alignment, reducing efficiency.To keep these processes in alignment, bring them together within the same collaboration system. Breaking down the separate silos improves visibility across the organization and allows employees to use additional tools, such as search capabilities and automated workflows. As a result, it’s easier for business development to reference the delivery process when they’re creating updates or new proposals.
- Lack of collaborative culture: Humans collaborate; systems don’t. If your on-site employees have been operating in their own silo without a collaboration platform, introducing the technology doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly become more collaborative. Systems facilitate collaboration, but humans must drive the interactions.One way to increase your company’s commitment to collaboration tools is by embedding certain metrics into staff reviews. You might want to measure (and reward) participation in improving the intranet and using enterprise social networking.
Moving to the cloud solve some collaboration issues with a distributed workforce. With Office 365, for example, your workforce gains better access to business information through mobile applications designed and maintained by Microsoft — a cost-effective solution for many professional services firms.
While there are many ways to make a collaboration platform easier to use and a better fit for your culture and specific methodology, your business information still needs to be maintained and informative.
To get the best results, start with a clear business driver, like bringing the proposal and delivery process closer together. This allows you to define the input and the output and track performance as you optimize the collaboration environment.
