Collaborative tools for Business:- In recent years the trend of enterprise softwares are clearly moving to collaborative tools. And the year 2016 saw the arrival of new players in this market, which accelerated the transition of companies to these new tools.
Corporate social networks, collaborative intranets, instant messaging, collaborative platforms … All these new tools transform the company but also the management methods. However, if these new collaborative tools can frighten managers, they also represent a great opportunity to evolve their management methods and motivate their employees in a more modern way.
Collaborative tools for Business: Opportunities for Management
Below are seven opportunities generated by collaborative platforms for managers?
- Have an Ear in his team
Major social networks such as Facebook or Twitter have brought about a change in mentality that is reflected in the world of work. Your employees feel free to express themselves, to give their opinion. And they are also waiting to be listened to. Some of your collaborators may be even influencers on Twitter or LinkedIn and they usually have a voice.
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Thanks to a social network of company you will be able to give more importance to the opinion of your employees. Do not hesitate to involve your teams by asking them their opinion on decisions of the daily newspaper or on choices a little more strategic. For example, collaborative tools make it possible to distribute small surveys or questionnaires. It is a great way for you to take the temperature of your team, to better understand what motivates them or, on the contrary, disturbs them.
- Developing the Culture of Transparency
A collaborative platform promotes freedom of expression and more public communications. This is an excellent way for managers to disseminate information more widely and to show that everyone has the same right of access to it. This also allows you to publicly address ideas, objections, criticisms … And reassure your teams by showing that there is no taboo.
Be careful, however, to prepare the communications on the most sensitive subjects. Share your decisions and explain them as clearly as possible. Your colleagues will hesitate a bit to disagree with everyone by publishing a small message. Take time to think your answer and make phrases that leave no room for interpretation.
- Collaborative tools to Encourage Agility
With a social networking company you can encourage agility. Encourage your employees to work in small groups. Create cross-functional groups yourself that will work on topics to test. Develop an agile culture: lots of exchanges and interactions, multiple iterations on deliverables, collaboration with “customers” … This will allow you to innovate more effectively and quickly see if new projects are viable or not.
- Broadly Disseminate Information
Being able to distribute content easily allows you to convey useful information faster and to the right people. With these new collaborative tools, your role as a manager evolves, and the flow of information becomes an even more important mission.
Be sure to share with your staff any resources that may interest them or help them grow. Encourage your team to share the interesting resources they discover. Do not be afraid to drown your team. People are increasingly accustomed to coping with a mass of important information, and the search engines present in these participatory platforms are there to facilitate access to information.
- Practice the Internal Connection
It becomes much easier and faster to interact with people with different skills to create value. Practice the internal connection. Set up groups of experts from different teams or departments. You will then become the coordinator of this collective intelligence which is a source of innovation very important for the company.
- Advancing Everyday
Collaborative platforms allow you to efficiently supplement the training and thus to advance your employees on a daily basis. Instead of long training sessions with a very small number of employees, regularly distribute short, efficient materials. You can, for example, post a video per week that will explain the different sales techniques, adding a small quiz at the end. This mini-training of a few minutes will be easier to apprehend by the collaborator and will leave more traces than a great institutional formation.
- Valuing more Regularly
Take advantage of these new interactions created by your corporate social network to enhance your employees more regularly. Highlight the “weekly salesperson” weekly by posting a short interview with him or just a small message that highlights his results and his work. Do not hesitate to use the video for this. A short video is today very simple to realize and to post with a Smartphone, and the impact is much superior.
Hello everyone! This is Richard Daniels, a full-time passionate researcher & blogger. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics. He loves to write about economics, e-commerce, and business-related topics for students to assist them in their studies. That's the sole purpose of Business Study Notes.
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