There has been a paradigm shift in how businesses function post the pandemic. 

For example, there was a time when you needed in-person team meetings to collaborate and achieve a common goal. Now, organizations need to address a new challenge in the form of a physical communication barrier between team members living in different parts of the world. 

Thus, the need for reliable Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for small businesses and large organizations arose from the need to address challenges around teams collaborating, sharing ideas, and managing workflows effectively. 

For most organizations, collaborative tools have become integral to their communication. In fact, as per a study by Gartner, nearly 80% of employees use collaborative tools for internal communications. 

Using these tools is a highly productive and cost-effective way to manage remote and hybrid teams worldwide. No matter your business size, you must adopt this technology to scale and thrive in today's digital world. 

But where does one start? This blog covers the seven best reasons your business must use collaborative tools at work. So, let's get started!

Reasons Companies Must Use Collaborative Tools and Software

1. Gets Work Done, Despite the Distance

According to a McKinsey report, improved communication and collaboration could increase productivity by up to 20-25%. 

Businesses can only do this by using low-cost and high-impact collaborative tools and software. Collaboration software blurs physical boundaries and lets teams seamlessly work across departments and locations to brainstorm ideas, discuss progress, share content, and more.

It also makes getting feedback from anyone on the team easier. This helps boost employee morale, maximizes productivity, and streamlines the entire working process.

2. Mitigates Redundant and Mundane Tasks

Employees spend a lot of time doing things that require their time, effort, and attention—for example, writing and responding to emails, filling in and submitting expense reports, and more. 

If you sum up all the time they work unproductively, you can see where the problem is. Instead of working endlessly on redundant tasks, these employees could focus on more strategic tasks that contribute massively to achieving organizational goals and long-term objectives. 

A simple start for businesses to free up employee time is automating all recurring, manual, and error-prone tasks. These tools boost employee work productivity, efficiency, and efficacy. 

For example, businesses can use an email management tool to help the team manage their email communication effectively. They can also use an email validation API to review their email lists and make sure that all email addresses are valid. These tools also help eliminate duplicate work with collaborative features, such as notes and a collision detection feature.

3. Provides Enterprise-Grade Security

Most collaboration tools for small businesses and even large organizations offer you high-end security. Their safety protocols include end-to-end encryption, two-factor authentication, firewalls, single sign-on, and password protection. Password-less authentication is also gaining popularity as a secure way to access your account without needing a password.

These protocols ensure that all your data is safe and protected from hackers. In addition, most of the collaborative tools now feature cloud-based security, which provides an extra layer of security.

For example, RingCentral offers high-end security featuring data encryption, protection, and secure user authentication and access control. In addition, RingCentral offers Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Real-Time Protocol (SRTP) encryption to provide you with highly secure communication between all endpoints. 

Industries highly vulnerable to cyberattacks, such as the public sector, can request their respective service providers to guarantee security protocols. You can also ask them to host your data. This is a better option than storing such sensitive data on local servers.

4. Makes Project Management Easy

Today, most employees work on the go or outside their office to connect with their peers, customers, clients, and partners. However, some higher management is still uncertain about working completely remotely. 

This is because it's impossible to keep track of all the employees, evaluate performance appraisals, and manage partners and clients in a fully remote setup. But there is a workaround even for this.

Businesses can use a free project management software for small, remote, and hybrid teams. Some of the most popular ones are Slack, Trello and it's alternatives. These tools offer many features, including task management, planning, scheduling, collaboration, time tracking, and even invoicing. In short, it covers all the stages of team and project management.

Collaborative tools make it easier to supervise employees and oversee your project's overall progress. You can also review the assigned and upcoming tasks that need to be done and collaborate with team members around workflow automation. Thus, it relieves the burden of micromanaging your team.

Moreover, this fosters a culture of open communication that keeps everyone on the same page and avoids mistakes that could have severe consequences. 

SUGGESTED READS:

• 7 Strategies to improve remote team productivity
• Hybrid work guidelines for 2022
• Top 30+ Remote Collaboration Tools For Small Businesses

5. Makes Troubleshooting a Breeze

Troubleshooting problems also get easier with collaborative tools, as they ensure seamless communication and smooth business operations. These software troubleshoot employee technical issues and offer help from one centralized location. Besides resolving critical issues, you can also streamline and automate your employees' support while saving time and money. Thus, allowing your employees to focus on the more essential tasks.

Another way of troubleshooting is to use collaborative tools for audio or video conferencing. This way, you can share your screen with your team members and discuss and resolve major workflow issues in real time. 

Collaborative tools eliminate the silo mentality when privy to all the information. This reduces bottlenecks in business processes and fosters a culture of teamwork and open communication. 

It also allows your remote employees to be more productive by connecting them with other team members virtually. In that way, they will be in a better position to communicate, collaborate, and develop better and more effective solutions.

6. Paves the Way for Highly Effective and Efficient Teamwork

Let us paint a picture for you; you have a global organization with offices in the US, UK, and the Middle East. Whether HR, marketing, sales, supply chain, or finance, you can manage your remote team more efficiently with a collaborative tool.

For example, with a CRM platform, the sales team can easily keep track of their key accounts and share their order requirement with the procurement and the production team. They can then collaborate with the supply chain team to deliver those shipments which will also positively impact the overall visibility in supply chain. Or, by using an expense report software, businesses can seamlessly manage business expenses, credit card reconciliations, mileage, per diem, and more.

Another example is HR for hiring a new employee. The HR team can use AI in the recruitment process to find the best candidate for the job. Then, they can collaborate with the finance team to work out their salary. Finally, they can transfer the recruit to the production team and fill the vacant position.

7. Enables Data-Driven Business Decisions

Making decisions alone is like reinventing the wheel. That's why you need input from your team members, even if physically distributed.

Collaborative tools bring your team together from across the globe. You can share content, documents, and files with your diverse team in real time. This helps you make effective and swifter decisions to resolve specific problems. 

These collaborative tools also have a record of the past decisions made. Businesses can consider these data points to make better decisions and prevent their business from falling into common pitfalls.

Collaboration with diverse experts with different backgrounds, experiences, and cultures is critical for making important decisions. This is because they all have different perspectives, and it will help you make your decision-making process much easier.

Conclusion

An ideal collaborative tool should be able to engage your in-house and remote teams seamlessly on both web-based and mobile apps. It will help your team to work more efficiently and effectively and ensure the long-term success of your business. 

With a collaborative tool, you can see your team communicate and collaborate more productively. In addition, it can help you better understand your organizational workflows, processes, and team members' collaboration to achieve delegated tasks. That helps your organization grow, scale, and thrive in the competitive marketplace.