The idea of collaboration is driven by the fact that there’s so much complexity in any given business these days. Organizations are seeking collaboration solutions to address the complexity by connecting people quickly to resolve issues and share knowledge.
Such solutions can improve productivity and help keep workers engaged, according to an article by Don Peppers on LinkedIn. We believe the key is to enable collaboration around business processes that make the organization more agile and responsive, which in turn has a meaningful impact on the customer experience.
As the article notes, no single person has all the knowledge about any given process. Companies are realizing that there’s a benefit to bringing everyone together to brainstorm and tackle obstacles as a team. It’s difficult to be innovative or even productive if people try to solve problems individually.
The idea is to connect people and provide them with different perspectives. That helps accelerate problem-solving and fuels innovation. Any new idea comes from the combination of two or more previous ideas, so it makes sense that innovation thrives in networked settings. Connecting people makes the process much more productive than having people in isolation, no matter how brilliant they may be.
It also helps to address employee engagement challenges related to works that feel disconnected from the larger picture — “how does my work contribute to improve customer satisfaction.” By offering basic social and tracking capabilities such as “following” a particular issue, document, team site or discussion, employees can now have more visibility into the bigger picture.
Innovation is also unlikely to happen if employees are disengaged. A well-designed collaboration platform can help prevent information workers from falling into rote, redundant tasks, such as emailing the same report back and forth. Such habits can easily create boredom and lack of attention to detail, which are both enemies of productivity.
Pepper’s article refers to these scenarios as “re-integration,” the ability of technology to help break some of the monotony that can result from high levels of specialization. We’ve discovered that connecting workers to new processes or areas of the company can help them continue to find meaning in their work.
Source: LinkedIn, September 2013
