Today, large volumes of data arrive at high speeds from different sources and in various formats, giving knowledge professionals fragmented information workflows. Data workers are now interacting with internal and external stakeholders utilising different apps and data sources across practices and functional areas. For companies seeking to analyse data outside of traditional storage, these data kinds provide a specific problem. The average knowledge worker must regularly negotiate this fragmented and segregated data landscape. As a result, professionals are spending more of their time organizing, searching and preparing data than they are on extracting value.
What does this lead to?
Consistent to-and-fro, never-ending email trails, an overwhelming amount of confusion, miscommunication, and delays that cost considerably. Add to this the fact that an internally-focused employee will only lead to an internally-focused team, significantly impacting cross-department functioning. And when each employee works only for themselves, it is obvious that the business growth and advancement will suffer.
However, teams that work with each other, keeping in mind the company's needs, goals, and mission while also considering their individual goals, experience unmatched success. It is the culture of collaboration that helps the company manage the tremendous pool of information, build positive relationships, resolve conflicts, enrich the employee experience, develop strategies for employee engagement, and create a thriving culture of innovation and creativity.
What now needs to be answered is - how should you inculcate a culture of team collaboration in the workplace. Though collaborative teams cannot be built overnight, the right mix of initiatives, tools, and well-thought-of strategies can help you empower your teams.
Read on to know what team collaboration tools are, their key elements, and how you build a collaborative team for your organisation.
What is Team Collaboration?
As the name suggests, team collaboration is nothing more than working with one another on a project, client, or idea to attain a common but better result. In a collaborative team, members brainstorm creatively, share workloads, figure out solutions to different challenges, manage friction constructively, and connect around a shared objective. With the unique skill set that each member brings to the table, a collaborative team can be more productive and efficient by approaching a single concern with different perspectives.
What are the Elements of a Team Collaboration Tool?
Before building a collaborative team with the help of team collaboration tools, it is important to understand the must-have elements that make them efficient and effective.
Communication
Clear communication is critical, from providing instructions to sharing information within the team or across departments. With a standardised communication protocol, members can interact, share documents, connect over calls and notify in real-time. With the right collaboration tool, employees can see all public chats, but they don't have to navigate through irrelevant discussions to find answers about specific projects or tasks.
Engagement
When each team member is equally involved and engaged in each task and activity, they tend to participate and contribute better, leading to greater results. For different team members to contribute and engage efficiently, cloud document management becomes non-negotiable for a collaboration tool. So, your collaboration software must allow employees to create and edit documents collectively, receive or share data, and collaborate directly.
Transparency
With fluent and clear communication channels, transparency plays an equally important role. From setting objectives, defining roles, and formulating strategies, keeping the processes and decision-making transparent helps team members feel important and valued. However, if data workers are to track down siloed data, it can significantly add to their stress, failing to manage data and solve problems. Therefore, a collaborative tool must enable employees to instantaneously find any public document data set with deep search abilities.
Reliability
A team that does not hold accountability will fail to function effectively with one another. Complying with security and privacy measures is of utmost significance for reliability. Though a tool with server encryption on the vendor’s side is critical, the more common source of any security breach is sloppy internal control. So, team collaboration tools must offer flexible permissions for controlled internal data access at appropriate levels. To render additional security, authentications and security protocols must often be part of such tools.
User-friendly Interface
If the goal of a collaboration tool is to bolster siloed data management and problem-solving, then putting all of the procedures required to reach a resolution on the same platform simplifies things even more. With a clumsy, difficult-to-navigate instrument, however, achieving this becomes challenging. Therefore, the tool must be simple to use, whether on a desktop or mobile, to guarantee seamless processing and cooperation.
What Does Needl.Ai Help You Accomplish?
Instead of working with the current siloed and fragmented data ecosystem, Needl.Ai offers a single source of truth for all data management requirements. It integrates leading productivity apps and content sources, bringing them together on one platform to enable teams to collaborate seamlessly.
In organisations where data is coming in at high volume and velocity, it is more important for all team members to have a shared context and build institutional memory. So, creating feeds of data that can be shared with colleagues and team members is critical. However, sharing data streams alone is not sufficient. It must be coupled with the ability for users to collaboratively synthesise insight and create context via the ability to highlight, comment and have seamless and insightful conversations around the data streams. Thus, we offer users to have custom feeds prebuilt to ingest data across multiple apps coherently. Moreover, collaborative feeds empower coworkers to search in one another’s data sources and networks in a permission-driven, high-trust environment.
Needl.Ai allows users to automatically exchange data with team members based on established criteria rather than manually forwarding it. They can invite peers, suppliers, or colleagues to collaborate on data in a tiny ecosystem. They can create feeds for personal consumption and notification and share contextual feeds with other Needl.Ai users, with appropriate access controls and granularity of feed sources. This alleviates the digital burden of having to forward common contextual data among team members.
In essence, Needl.Ai is all you need to create an information and data-driven team and collaborative organisation.
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