Smart collaboration at work

Satish Thiagarajan at Brysa explains why smart collaboration, and not a location-first mindset, is the future of work

 

Hybrid, remote, office-based. The debate about the best working model is becoming tedious. While remote offered freedom and hybrid tried to balance culture, neither option provided the [1] [2] [3] solution that businesses needed, leaving silos and inefficiencies. But then the return to the office created dissatisfied staff. It’s a catch-22.

 

But what if the reason we can’t find a fix-all solution is that we’re asking the wrong question? What if, instead of focusing on where people work, we look at how work flows? Perhaps then, we’ll get to see the full potential of smart collaboration as the ultimate workplace efficiency model.

 

 

The barriers of the location-first mindset

Until 2020 and the COVID pandemic, few of us considered where employees should work. They came into offices, and that was that. But the necessity to work from home changed perspectives. Questions were raised about the cost savings of remote working and the impact on employee happiness and productivity. But while teams remained busy, that didn’t translate into productivity.

 

Hybrid working came next, once the threat of the pandemic receded, but this still didn’t deliver the results that businesses needed. According to a  Glassdoor survey, collaboration begins to fail. 43% of hybrid workers have found it harder to connect to their colleagues, 41% struggled to learn from their peers, and 41% found it challenging to build a relationship with their manager or senior colleagues. Burnout and disengagement also rose, to a staggering 69%.

 

Businesses struggled with changing security challenges. Even five years on, 82% of businesses remain concerned about the security risks of employees working remotely. And there’s still no answer as to which model works best, because location isn’t the problem.

 

This location-first mindset has led us all to miss the genuine drivers of performance, because it masks inefficiencies in workflows and decision-making. Smart collaboration deals with that.

 

 

What is smart collaboration?

Is mart collaboration just another buzz phrase? It’s tempting to think so. But smart collaboration is synonymous with productivity, because it takes the focus away from where people work, and instead looks at how they collaborate and get things done. It brings together artificial intelligence, workflow automation, integrated data and human interaction to create a model better suited to contemporary working, essentially creating a central nervous system for your organisation.

 

It starts with the introduction of intelligent collaboration platforms, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Discord. These can be used to help your teams turn conversations into decisions and decisions into workflows. With the potential to integrate with different apps and make information accessible in context, it results in a scenario where your teams are able to spend more time on the things that matter because they’re being supported in new ways.

 

Depending on the platform you use, intelligent collaboration can rapidly summarise conversations and use AI to pull out the insights. This means that threads can be condensed into actionable updates, key decisions can be highlighted, and blockers can be flagged. It instantly streamlines all communications.

 

When you integrate AI with your intelligent collaboration platform, you unlock the potential for the automation of repetitive tasks, such as onboarding, expense approvals, or leave requests. This can remove pressure from your teams and bottlenecks from your workflows.

 

Other integrations can bring more benefits. With Slack, for example, you can integrate data from Salesforce, Google Drive, Jira, Zoom, as well as hundreds of other tools. This provides your team with a single source of truth. They no longer have to waste time toggling between platforms, as everything is in one place.

 

And it can also be used to embed context directly into your work channels, helping meetings and collaboration to become more efficient. There’s no need for endless syncs, and you can be certain that decisions are transparent and searchable. But it doesn’t stop there.

 

 

Adding AI CRM management to the mix

When you bring your collaboration platform together with an AI CRM management platform, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics 365, you change the game entirely. You’re bringing together your digital HQ, where conversations and workflows live, and your system of record that provides customer intelligence and pipeline visibility. And in the process, you’re opening so many doors.

 

You gain actionable insights in context, enhancing decision-making and ensuring everyone understands what’s happening – and what needs to happen next. There comes the potential for further automation, this time in deal-to-delivery workflows, where a closed deal can trigger onboarding tasks and alert customer success, instantly, without human interference.

 

You also gain the potential for customer-centric collaboration. There is no efficiency in sales teams being siloed away from customer service agents. Using Salesforce and Slack together, for example, a support agent can pull up a customer’s Salesforce profile right next to their open ticket. At the same time, the sales team is looped in for upsell opportunities, and it can all be done in the same place, at the same time. And the best bit? It benefits all working models.

 

 

Remote, hybrid, in-house

How many times have you seen team members in the same room, or even at adjoining desks, communicating through email? Of course, they could just communicate verbally, raising their eyes from their screens. But that way, information can be easily lost, so they choose whatever electronic form is onboarded by the business, so that all data relevant to the work is traceable and accountable.

 

That’s what makes smart collaboration such a useful model, regardless of where your team members work. When you replace in-house email communication with Teams or Slack, the data isn’t just traceable, it’s collated and easily shareable and accessible to all, and can then be used to form the basis of data analysis, action and in-person interactions.

 

The intelligence gathered by your office-based Sales teams using your collaboration tools can become insights for your remote service personnel, updates for team meetings, or a faster way to escalate problems to supervisors.

 

Smart collaboration isn’t about going overboard with tech or bringing staff reluctantly back to the office. But neither is it specifically about enabling hybrid or remote working models. Its role is to bring efficiency and productivity to every working model by shifting the focus from location to collaboration. This results in faster decisions and a workplace designed for impact.

 

With the right tools implemented in the right way, smart collaboration can change the way your business works for the better. 

 

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Satish Thiagarajan is founder and CEO of Brysa

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Vadym Pastukh