Four ideas to improve collaboration and team-working
Countless studies have proven that collaboration and team-working can significantly improve a company’s performance. But how do you boost collaboration among your employees?
Here’s a list of 4 tools to consider:
Instant messaging apps
Instant messaging apps are a great tool for making communication easier in the workplace. The advantages are numerous: they are quick, intuitive and colleagues can converse in real time. Most importantly, they help to significantly reduce the amount of emails that clog your inbox.
A popular instant messaging app is Slack - it is a digital workspace where you can create different channels to manage messages, discussions and notifications by purpose, department or topic.
Chatbots
Chatbots are largely used to improve the user experience on company websites. However, this is only one of the many uses of this technology. Chatbots can also be leveraged in internal communication among different departments - they can guide conversations and interactions between different areas of a business and ensure that important messages are delivered and acknowledged.
Collaboration Platforms
As the name suggests, these platforms enhance collaboration among company teams. They serve as digital workplaces for colleagues to check on the status of projects and to share data with other departments. At Strillobyte, we use Trello and Basecamp.
Trello is a collaboration tool that organises your projects into boards, cards and lists. At a a glance, you can see what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and at what stage any task is within a process. Boards give you a comprehensive view of all the elements of a project, while lists and cards allow you to organise and prioritise actions. Cards can be easily dragged and dropped within lists and can contain deadlines, attachments, checklists, images, discussion notes and coloured labels.
Basecamp works more like a project sharing platform. Each project contains several areas with very specific features, e.g. a Message Board, a space for Docs & Files, To-Do Lists and so on. Users are automatically notified of anything that is assigned or relevant to them, and you can set up automatic check-in questions such as “what did you work on today?” to encourage everyone in a project or team to share regular updates.
Gamification
“The application of typical elements of gameplaying (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.”
Wikipedia
Everyone loves a game. More and more companies are leveraging this simple fact for all sorts of purposes, e.g. to promote their values and mission among employees, or even to share and explain the rationale behind certain business strategies (check this cool project that we did a while ago with our friends at Scarlett Abbott).
Have you ever tried one of these tools to improve collaboration and team work? Which one do you think is the most effective?
On 2nd May, we’re having a Twitter chat about collaboration. Follow #GoodTechChat on our Twitter channel (@Strillobyte) to join us. Save the date!
Great ideas and businesses need great teams to support growth. Surround yourself with innovative and creative people, and make sure that collaboration is constantly fostered by creating occasions and spaces for them to talk and exchange views and opinions.
Marco Strillozzi, founder of Strillobyte
