Encouraging Collaboration in Businesses
Facilitating Collaboration is rarely – if ever – discussed in a negative light, but many small businesses and business decision makers do not attach enough value to collaborating and likewise do not do enough to facilitate it. The way business is done has already been dramatically transformed in today’s digital age, and technological advances continue to drive further change. Smart SMBs understand how to best leverage new technology to promote business success and growth. In a recent Inman News article, contributor Gahlord Dewald stressed the value of collaboration for solving problems.
The Value of Facilitating Collaboration
Dewald noted how the nature of business relationships can vary. Some relationships are clearly defined, but this is not always the case.
“In these situations, where the structure of the relationship isn’t truly collaborative, the formality of standard text documents and spreadsheets may hinder true collaboration,” Dewald wrote. “No one wants to offend the other person by ‘messing up their work.’ It’s as if there’s some sort of hidden relationship between the structure of our working relationships and the structure of the documents our working relationships produce. As the importance and structure of facilitating collaboration in our relationship increases, the ability to work together on structured documents like word processing files also increases.”
Facilitating Small Business Collaboration and Teamwork Model
However, business team members need to get passed this fear of insulting others participating in business discussions, instead being confident in the value of their contributions. In a recent ZDNet article, contributor Heather Clancy emphasized the importance of technology for enabling social collaboration in cloud-hosted business environments.
While Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer may have banned telework, this is not the case for the majority of businesses today. Small businesses in particular often allow employees to work remotely, whether due to a belief in the effectiveness of such an approach, pressure to meet worker demands or because the business doesn’t have a central physical office space. As the modern workforce becomes increasingly distributed, technology is further relied upon for facilitating collaboration.
Hosted PBX services from AccessDirect enable business users to facilitate collaboration in many different ways. While a hosted system allows team members to interact through more traditional voice channels, additional services include a number of advanced features and functionality that integrate other channels. For example, with hosted PBX, businesses can take advantage of sophisticated call management features like an advanced auto attendant for seamless call routing. End users also benefit from AccessDirect’s advanced voicemail to email feature, which sends an email to the inbox associated with the extension notifying the individual that a message is waiting. The fax to email feature works in the same way, centrally funneling various communication and collaboration channels.
