Improving internal efficiencies is one of the surest ways a company can provide more value to its customers. However, the outdated, manual processes and disconnected systems companies still use to deliver their products and services today can prevent them from realizing the more efficient operating model they’re trying to achieve.
That lag is felt strongest in a company’s communication infrastructure. According to data from Salesforce, 86% of business owners and employees said a lack of collaboration or inefficient communication were the main causes of workplace failures. Another survey from Dimensional Research shows that 83% of workers use technology to collaborate, but over half experience problems using their companies’ collaboration tools.
Building true collaboration into the framework of a company is essential for businesses of all sizes, but it requires the right collaborative technology. With the right tools, teams across every department — and even customers and third-party partners — can collaborate with each other to significantly boost productivity and value.
An Operating Model Framework Built on Digital Collaboration
In a FinancesOnline report, the use of collaborative technology and agile team collaboration tools showed the potential to improve a company’s productivity by up to 30%. To realize that potential, companies can use these strategies to combine the right tools and technologies into an all-inclusive and collaborative operating model framework:
1. Develop a common operational picture.
Companies that don’t have a common operational picture guiding their teams’ collaborative efforts should start by developing the framework for one. This picture is defined by a single source of truth that all collaboration revolves around. Every chat or session that teams initiate and complete can be guided by the same source of information and work within the same collaborative operating model framework.
2. Make messaging task-centric.
Productivity and value can be lost easily in the quagmire of endless chats. Virtual chat capabilities are inherently essential to digital collaboration, but combining tasking and messaging systems into one operating model framework will reduce the volume of unnecessary chat. Instead of discussing what the next best steps are, employees can keep chats focused on how to proceed in accordance with the common operational picture.
3. Give employees the ability to collaborate freely.
Combining tasking and chatting requires breaking down siloes so teams can access the same information. This is the core benefit of digital collaboration tools in the work environment. Eliminating the barriers between teams and external collaborators, and giving them a shared digital environment, helps further improve efficiencies by allowing data and communication to flow seamlessly.
4. Provide context alongside data.
The foundation of a more efficient operating model has to be collaboration, and that takes more than just raw data. With Coolfire, digital collaboration tools collect and define data by context and are API-integrated to make connecting with various devices and legacy systems easy and efficient. With this context behind it, the data that teams collaborate around will make it much easier to keep communication focused on task completion.
Companies today are of little value to their customers if they aren’t efficient, and they can’t be efficient without collaboration. Fortunately, collaborating is much easier and more efficient for companies of all sizes with the right collaborative technology and operating framework to guide them.
