The Struggle For Effective Communication & Collaboration In Business

The technology that all of us rely on to do business has advanced incredibly rapidly. Emailing HD images and large documents from computers to smartphones was considered largely impossible as little as 10 years ago – now it is very much the norm.

It’s fair to say that the rate of technological advancement is actually outpacing us. It’s an amazing feat, but Steve Lohr argued in Business Standard that business technologies “are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognising patterns”. This illustrates that there is arguably an ever increasing role for technology to play in the world of business.

The implementation of technology in business is nothing new, but the addition of effective technology is something entirely different. It is also something that changes depending on the nature of a business.

However, overall, one can say that there are two fundamental uses of technology that are universal for all businesses. These are communication and collaboration.

Opening Up New Avenues Of Communication

There are new areas of communication, opened up by technology, now available to us. There are many typically present in offices and businesses, and new ones are developed all the time.

In the early days, email was arguably the ever present – and it still is. But the revolution of software technologies has meant that our email clients are garnished with all sorts of other functionality that we never thought about before. Chat functions, video conferencing, calendars and file hosting are standard inclusions in Gmail for example.

There are some other technologies that are very much at the forefront for businesses, particularly on the larger scale;

·         IP Telephony – Interestingly, people still like to talk on the phone to one another. However the mechanism of using them is now largely dependent on pushing voice over internet protocol (VoIP). This turns telephone uses into data, and allows places like call centres to manage a high volume of calls effectively, often with a software interface allowing things like customer records to be pulled up quite easily.

·         Unified Communications – Businesses often have a range of communications tools. From email clients and phones to interactive whiteboards and mobility apps. It’s a huge amount to manage and unified communications systems can be implemented to make them more integrated. The benefit of this is access to up to date data and information across a variety of systems, applications or devices.

·         Video Conferencing – Business is becoming a lot more mobile thanks to the development of advanced data networks capable of transferring large amounts of data. For example, video conferencing is now very easy to do as most laptops, tablets and smartphones have a webcam. The benefit is that businesses are now capable of making meetings, training sessions, seminars and even presentations via the web.

Communication is a very important aspect of all business, and modern business can take advantage of rapidly advancing technologies. This makes a business more capable of competing in the information age by enhancing the ability to communicate but also the efficiency of communication in such a setting.

Fostering Collaboration

Collaboration with others is fundamental to the success of a business, and arguably the overall human experience. It’s a very lofty concept, but recent advances in technology are now able to provide businesses with an array of different tools that can help people work together.

By fostering collaboration it is possible to create a much more efficient business, one that works well with its various parts and operates more as a ‘whole’ as opposed to a collection of segmented fragments.

There are many top collaboration tools, but some broadly usable ones include;

·         Project Mapping – With certain tools, one of which was found in the research for this piece called Gantt Charts, you can collaborate on project mapping. This allows teams of people to plan tasks, track progress, estimate completion dates and manage workloads across a team with a great degree of efficiency.

·         Collaboration Suites – If you want to have a single set of collaborative tools, you can use a collaboration suite to help you reach that goal. This allows you to manage projects, view calendars, track daily progress and see the position of others in their work in one application. Popular suites include Basecamp and Asana.

·         Social – There are many ways a social network, set up perhaps over a corporate intranet, can help people collaborate. This is especially true for larger businesses. People can ask questions of each other and even just socialise to get to know one another. This makes the process of integrating new employees a lot more efficient.

There is an amazing array of options for businesses looking to collaborate. What these really do is make collaboration more flexible, they facilitate collaboration as opposed to creating it. All in all, there needs to be a motivation to collaborate and such tools can help.

Technological Progress = Advanced Communication & Collaboration

The incentive to make communication and collaboration more effective in business is plain, it makes businesses work better. There are a huge amount of different subtleties, which will probably change business to business, but there is a need to embrace these technologies in order to make the struggle for more effective communication and collaboration easier.

Thanks for reading. Please check out the rest of my work for The Technoperative. I’d recommend “New Year’s Resolutions: Some Practical Ideas For 2014”.

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