The Role of Collaboration and Communication Platforms in Digital Era

Communication is indispensable, whether it’s a small business or an enterprise. 

But today, we don’t have a huge atrium for communication.

On the one hand, the amount of information exchanged between employees is enormous. We are in a state of information fatigue. On the other hand, getting access to critical information at the right time and in the right place is becoming increasingly difficult. In most cases, information is locked up behind email addresses, hindering collaboration and action.

Add a pandemic to the equation. The pandemic has alienated us socially and made effective communication more difficult yet necessary. Thus increasing the number of overworked, overworked, unengaged, and burned-out employees.

The way out of this predicament, of course, is technology. As we work in today’s remote work environment, we need the same digital network of connections as we do in our personal lives. Organizations need a digital work platform that leverages the best of cloud technology, data, artificial intelligence, and more and is devoid of siloed, technologically flawed tools that slow down work and hinder communication. A digital collaboration and communication platform isn’t just a collection of different features; it’s a bundle of values that has a lasting impact on how you work and collaborate.

A collaboration platform can impact both the quality of work and employee morale, and happy, engaged employees perform better. It can help make strategic changes to the business in a more planned, consistent, and sustainable way; you can keep everyone in the loop. And it can provide security for the future and readiness for today; you don’t have to create and implement a business continuity plan every time there’s a change in the work climate.

It can make work enjoyable, meaningful, and productive for everyone in your company by playing these roles:

Cultural wave breaker

A collaboration platform should allow you to be constantly evolving, keep your culture active, and provide opportunities for new ideas and perspectives, even when teams are spread out. It should foster a positive, open spirit of communication that transcends the many screens that currently separate your teams.

Humanizer

It is inherently human to resist change. Every collaboration tool has a learning curve and resistance that your employees experience. So the platform should not bore employees with its scale and complexity and make them feel like they’re on the upswing every time a new feature is launched.

 Charge

The work platform should foster growth, not inhibit it. Many ideas and opinions will germinate and coexist on your growth trajectory while you determine the way forward; the forum should stay intact under its weight. On the contrary, the platform should foster processes and communications so that you succeed.

 Problem solver

The platform should not make problem-solving more of a challenge than the problem itself. You should have practical, well-defined, transparent processes and accountability to resolve the tensions between you and your overall goal.

Community builder

The platform should not create virtual cubicles for your teams. It should offer robust collaboration tools for real-time interaction, file sharing, audio/video calls, etc., to ensure and encourage ownership and participation in your employees’ community.

Google Workspace has become such a modern collaboration and communication platform for us.

Google Workspace’s cloud-native work tools are driven by artificial intelligence, inherent simplicity, knowledge, security, and collaborative culture.

While we enjoyed the benefits of working in the cloud, the actual scale of the impact was felt when the pandemic hit. Thanks to Google Workspace, we could confidently and quickly decide to ask our employees to turn their homes into offices. Faster than that decision was how our employees adapted to modern, 100% remote work. Because we had spent years preparing for the elements of modern work – real-time collaboration, access to data and files on any device, the ability to share information instantly, video conferencing to connect with distributed teams, and more – these overnight changes didn’t faze us. We were able to continue to provide exceptional service to our customers without any aggravation or disruption.

Google workspace as a cultural wave maker

The Google Workspace, created in line with Google’s philosophy of connected work and meaningful collaboration in real-time, fits the way we want to work. We can use crowdsourcing for feedback and identify issues and ideas across teams, even in our distributed global teams.

Google Workspace as a humanization tool

The workforce of the future is using Google Workspace – 140 million students and faculty use Google Workspace for education. Many of our employees, mostly millennials, already use Google Workspace, which saves us time training them to use Google applications and tools.

Google Workspace as a charger

It broke down the invisible barriers of disconnected and blocked apps. In dynamic cases with urgent deliverables, we had multiple team members working on a single document and completing the task in a day or two.

Google Workspace as a problem solver

Flexibility is a key factor in our work. We can access our data and applications securely from any device, tag the right team members in documents, share files on the go, send chat messages or participate in a video call – depending on the task.

Google Workspace as a community-building tool

We hosted a multi-day virtual event for employees across the company, joined by employees from over six time zones. There were no technical glitches at the event – all thanks to connected Google Workspace apps.

Conclusion

In any organization, teams must collaborate to brainstorm innovative ideas and complete projects. These teams need the right tools to maximize productivity, and organizations are increasingly adopting team collaboration platforms.

Empower your teams with a workspace platform that allows you to achieve great things.