Three Ways To Increase Productivity With Collaborative Communication

Companies can use collaborative communication to allow a wide variety of people to easily contribute quickly and more important, equally on a project

. Hierarchical communication, on the other hand, can lead to inefficiencies by limiting information flow to a few rigid channels and inhibiting access to useful ideas and information.

More Ideas = Better Ideas-

One of the key points of a brainstorming session is to hear as many ideas as possible, ultimately leading to a lot more good ideas. Enterprise collaboration provides a similar benefit. Since everyone can contribute ideas easily, it's also easier to gather them and process them as well as giving you a bigger pool of creativity and expertise as a resource. Efficient collaboration allows your company to draw from the best its people have to offer.

To ensure that collaboration is helpful instead of confusing, define clear and consistent ways of processing the information and ideas collaborators share. Let those with relevant expertise help rate the value of the ideas that are contributed. Another way to keep things moving is to set a cut-off point for ideas and to start implementation of the usable ideas. Clear boundaries at the brainstorming stage of a project actually provide the freedom to generate ideas with the confidence that they will be responsibly used and evaluated.

Help Across Disciplines-

Another way that collaboration improves productivity is by breaking down the "silo" mentality that can compartmentalize different departments or disciplines. When enterprise collaboration is available and efficient, it allows people to draw on the expertise of co-workers who are not directly related to their tasks or divisions. This helpful contact can occur through direct communication, such as asking questions by e-mail, or through comments and conversations on a multi-department communication platform. Providing useful feedback in other contexts can provide employees with a sense of satisfaction and big-picture engagement, while the ideas and information they share can increase overall productivity by providing more efficient access to the information needed to do an excellent job.

Distributed Effort-

Collaborative communication also makes it easier to efficiently distribute labor. It increases transparency regarding a project's goals, stages and sub-tasks, as well as keeping it easier to see who is responsible for which portions of the project. Real-time status updates can keep the whole group abreast of each part of the project. Effective communication platforms also make it easier for people to ask for favors, re-assign tasks or work together to accomplish their goals. Up-to-date information on which dependencies are resolved minimizes the time lag between one task's completion and the start of the next.

by: Dell Garraputo

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