Set your collaborators up for success.
With the ubiquity of mobile, wearable and connected devices, you, your team and your external collaborators are available around the clock. In fact, we all are.
With so many people available for communications and so many choices of device and medium, you need a platform flexible enough to match your choices. If you’re figuring out whom to include and whom to exclude in each communication, you’re too slow. If you don’t know in an instant what each new message is about, you’re too slow. In fact, if you’re still relying on email, you’re too slow.
What you really need is a unified platform that you can use from device to device that organizes your workspaces and collaborators so you don’t have to figure those things out.
Invite Your Collaborators
Who’s on your project? Is it your whole team, just part of your team, people from other departments? Sometimes when the members of a project group don’t break neatly with the company org chart, things can get messy. We all get a little insular over time.
Most organizations look for the perfect tool for flexible project management, open and private communication, file sharing and more. And people want to build workflows for timesheets, project tasks, expense reports and more. Look for a tool powerful, flexible and intuitive enough to meet all your needs.
Workspaces and Threads
You have to plan ahead to support the collaborative, fluid modern work environment. The complexity and speed of business is driving companies away from the old model in which individual departments are separated and collaborating with other departments requires executive permission and an act of god.
With Kintone, workspaces can be based on teams, projects, any collaborative purpose, with interdepartmental members. Each workspace can be divided into individual threads for more focused participation. Workspace managers can create guest workspaces, where collaborators from outside the company can interact with the group the same as employees. Depending on the permissions in place, workspace administrators or even members can create new threads, add applications or invite members.
Create Open Discussions
Sometimes your project group can be limiting too. One of the benefits of social media is the ability to find instant answers to questions from a vast extended network of experts. Create a public forum for your entire company, even partners, even customers. Follow Kintone users who provide good answers so you stay informed of the right information and create good relationships.
A public wall fosters a culture of trust, collaboration and productivity. The benefits of an open culture will trickle down to throughout your organization.
Communicate Peer-to-Peer
In even the most open corporate culture, direct communication between individuals is necessary for a number of reasons:
- Consideration for the time of people who aren’t involved
- Private matters
- Taking ownership of a project
Take advantage of person-to-person messages for peer-to-peer communication. Individual conversations also help to avoid awkward misunderstandings in messages. After all, communication is more than just what you say; it’s how you say it and to whom you say it. It’s who hears it and who responds.
This is particularly true in business situations, where the composition of teams, workgroups, decision-makers and executors can be the difference between making bad decisions, making no decisions, and squashing your competition. Too often this paradigm can mean a weekly meeting, a slew of emails and a project spreadsheet for every group you belong to. Forward-thinking organizations seek a more nimble model with more precise relationships.
Conclusion
Companies are spending too much on travel, facilities and man hours. The Kintone collaborative platform helps to reduce those costs while also improving productivity. Learn more about online collaboration and business productivity, and take a free trial of Kintone.
