Working in a connected world - revisited
Businesses are becoming globalised, with employees who work from different locations and not just in the office - working from home is the obvious option here. Your employees can be in another country, or even on another continent. So how do you make sure they are kept engaged and feel like a part of the global team?
When working remotely, or thinking about working remotely, the worry can be that employees can become disengaged. This could be due to lack of leadership, or belief in corporate purpose, and simply being removed from a solid working environment.
And that’s why collaborative tools and processes are so important. By using these types of tools, issues like this can be corrected or avoided entirely, since the company encourages sharing, the capture of knowledge, enabling action, and empowering employees to become part of the company’s future.
Picture your own company working in a remote manner, because there’s a good chance a portion of your workforce already is. If you have a sales force who are on the road for most of the year, how well do you all collaborate on a regular basis? Would you like to keep in touch daily, or monthly, or quarterly? Do they feel they are part of the team?
With remote working, one of the areas where effective collaboration breaks down is via growth, through acquisition or alliance, when each of the separate entities has different technologies. These aren’t compatible, and thus, true collaboration between them breaks down. Don’t startle yet, as modern technology has come through to make this less of an issue.
The collaborative tools of today bring major value to innovative thinkers by echoing their goals, thoughts, notes, discussions, documents and brainstorming sessions to an entire company. There are many cloud-based tools out there on the market such as Microsft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet plus management tools such as Monday.com, Wrike, Asana and many more.
But how effective are the tools that your organisation has been using? Do you feel you can communicate, and all the information you need is in an easily accessible, central place? For example, I was talking to a Midlands based organisation that was made up of nine separate companies that have come together to deliver a series of projects, but they all used different email software, project planning/tracking, task management and info sharing. How could they all contribute and share common information that was relevant?
Enabling a remote workforce requires you to understand what the problems you are trying to solve are, in terms of effective communication. If you don’t feel your organisation is working as effectively as a team, it might be worth having an independent review to identify any gaps, with the aim to provide appropriate technology to help make your business more efficient and scalable.