Having frictionless collaboration is almost impossible without the added stress of remote work. And when technology is new or foreign to a single team member or a whole department, it’s easy to dwell on the difficulties rather than implementing processes to reduce collaboration tool friction.
But how do you take the friction out of collaboration tools?
Reducing Friction for Your Team
The Design Gym talks about ways to reduce collaboration friction on the individual, team, and organizational levels. The first order of business when it comes to reducing friction within a remote team is to embrace your differences. Accommodating personal rhythms within remote workflows can go a long way toward creating a more cohesive team experience.
Another tip for creating a better remote team experience includes making it easy to share your work. The easiest way to avoid friction here is to choose a collaboration tool that supports file-sharing and includes plug-ins or applications for commenting or editing files as a team.
Reducing Friction by Simplifying Your Collaboration Tool Use
Though you should encourage your team members to find workflows that help optimize their duties, one thing you can do to reduce collaboration tool friction is to standardize and simplify your toolkit.
Make sure all your teams, departments, and special projects collaborators are using the same collaboration tools – and it’s even better if you can find a single tool to implement and use across your work areas. This reduces friction when it comes time to collaborate inter-departmentally.
Lead with Purpose – And a Clear Agenda
When you set up times to collaborate virtually, you can reduce friction by training team leaders and meeting organizers to lead with purpose. You can avoid those chronic
meetings that should’ve been emails” by preparing an agenda for them.
If you start your preparation and find yourself out of substantial action items, it might be more worth your time to create some team messages or files to look over rather than scheduling a virtual meeting
There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Communication
In a world where most of our communication is virtual – and by that nature very easily misinterpreted – there is no such thing as too much communication.
We have more ways than ever to help us collaborate. Using the full range of tools in your collaboration technology arsenal, you can show and tell your teams and colleagues what you are trying to accomplish with every project, and they can collaborate more effectively with more options.
Encourage your teams to contact each other more often, rather than less, to reduce friction and increase productivity.
Leverage a Personal Digital Adoption Coach
Each of your team members will have different and unique collaboration technology challenges. 60% of collaboration platforms go unused by companies, and it’s difficult to track employee adoption.
Nearly all businesses are investing in more and more collaboration technologies. And underutilizing this investment causes missed revenue opportunities.
Put Bex to Work!
Meet Bex, a digital adoption and training automation platform powered by Meet Me In The Cloud. Bex was built to help your employees customize their collaboration tool learning and reduce friction that comes with skill gaps and constant tech updates. Bex is purpose-built for Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, and is available on-demand, 24/7.
Bex includes two pieces: Bex Bot and a desktop application. You can learn more here or contact Bex today.
