Collaborative online work is not new, but it has taken a central place in companies since the Covid pandemic. Organizing a regular videoconference is now part of the daily life of executives. In addition, the concept of team is now declined in a combined way between company staff and external partners, making the organization of multi-platform videoconferences essential. Therefore, the issue of online collaborative work and remote collaboration is a strategic issue for all organizations. Faced with this challenge, business leaders are wondering how to better unite their remote teams. We offer here four practical solutions to meet this major challenge.
Online Collaborative Work Tools
First of all, we must not confuse communicating and federating. For example, the exchange of mails makes it possible to communicate but in no case to federate. To unite, you have to rise in the order of interaction, that is, say, hear, see, and touch. To develop the effectiveness of collaborative online work successfully, the company must teach its members good practice on the “nature of the exchange or interaction medium” pair. For collaboration with remote teams, this goes perfect.
How do you manage to implement this good practice?
As is often the case, the first response lies in the exemplary nature of management, but this can be preceded by information from human resources in the form of a few rules/recommendations to be followed by all employees.
Places Of Collaborative Work Online
As stated earlier, the ultimate level of communication and federation is at the face-to-face level. When your remote teams join you on your premises, it is, therefore, essential to promote this face-to-face practice as much as possible in the form of informal and formal places of exchange.
Their attractiveness (comfort, design, conviviality or even playfulness) will play an important role in the frequency and quality of exchanges between employees.
These formal meeting places must also be in sufficient number, which means that a room management system must return information on the availability of these spaces so that management can take the right action in the event of a shortage. It should be noted that you will need to have a corporate culture favourable to video collaboration to set up a videoconferencing solution!
Online Collaborative Work Connections
Your remote teams depend in their communication with the rest of the company on the quality and availability of their intra or internet connection. In the event of nomadism outside (with a customer, a supplier, etc.), there is not much the company can do, apart from equipping its teams with high-performance smartphones (4G, Wifi). On the other hand, in the company’s premises, if you really want to federate your remote teams so that they can work collaboratively online, you have to put the package on the quality of the Internet connection in the collaboration spaces. This is the only guarantee that your teams will want to connect by federative means (audio-web-videoconference) to their distant colleagues.