Collaboration software is the new pillar for organizations to huddle together and work towards productivity. Every organization has its own way of building collaboration into their workplaces i.e some nurture creativity, some can promote communication or some might prefer teamwork instead of longevity. Another way for securing the future of collaboration in the organization is collaboration software.
From in-office employees to remote workers, there are hurdles in increasing collaboration and streamline their work. This is where the need for collaboration software occurs, to maintain the work and ensure no delayed productivity. Collaboration software marks the unbiased streamlining of work and provides equal opportunities to both SMBs and huge enterprises.
Research from Gartner predicts the collaboration market will be reaching $4.9 billion by 2021. Around 70% of teams will rely on collaboration software by the year 2022. Well, this is just the prologue, here are some of the statistics implicating the collaboration advantage in the organizations.
› Bradio says, 48% of the employees prefer collaboration software and 81% believe their work productivity is two-fold after the usage of collaborative tools.
› The collaboration software market has gained a huge height from USD 7 billion in 2015 to 12 billion in 2020. It is further expected to extend to USD 13. 58 billion in 2023.
› One of the most popular collaboration software, Slack has gained 10 million daily active users from January 2019 to August 2020.
› According to ReasearchAndMarkets.com, the collaboration software market size will be reaching USD 16.60 billion by 2025.
Information week states 62% of their employees believe collaboration software is the top business driver.
When we talk about using collaboration software, this not only is for faster work and increased throughput. Collaboration tools also focus on data security and privacy issues and this is the reason for its growing popularity. A study found that 49% of the boomers, 37% of Generation Z, and 28% of millennials prefer security before buying software and they almost always rely on several kinds of collaboration software.
All this data shows the reliability of organizations on collaboration software but let’s now have a look at the reason for this huge requirement.
1. Work Acceleration
Work acceleration is the major advantage of using collaboration software. Collaboration Software integration with tools like Dropbox, and Google Doc. speed up work and the employees can also import and export documents through these integrations. Using collaboration software not only saves time with everything done on a digital platform but also reduces paperwork.
For example: With a groupware Confluence and Zoho, it is easy to publish, share, and organize all sorts of organization information. This helps the employees to stay updated and keep track of every work while saving time.
2. Improvised work scheduling
It is to be noted that lack of scheduling wastes up to 40% of the employee’s total working hours. With collaboration software, the employees get improvised work scheduling and keep track of every work plan. Here are some to-be-known benefits of collaboration software.
› Collaboration software allows daily, weekly and monthly scheduling to further maintain an efficient workflow.
› Using collaboration software, the employees can share info including personal and public calendars to meet deadlines and meetings.
› The employees can schedule daily meetings, sessions, and conferences using groupware like Asana. The groupware also allows scheduling dates and times for different tasks.
› The collaboration software has different options such as workgroup applications, department-based applications, and whole enterprise applications that allow scheduling of different levels of work into the organizations.
3. Encourage remote working
With time remote working is becoming the ‘avoir besoin’ for the organizations. Remote working has its own undeniable benefits like access to the work from anywhere. There are various collaboration applications that help in different ways from reporting to software development.
› Zoom - Zoom is one of the most used video-calling apps with a gallery view that allows the users to and helps in remote team collaboration.
› Slack - Slack is a widely popular team communication tool that also has the feature of automatically reporting on business activity, bots to help employee engagement and create new mail subscriptions or product reviews.
› Github - This groupware allows users to manage projects to build software. It also helps in hosting and reviewing code and is a great team collaboration software.
› InVision - InVision helps remote workers to detailed discussions, demonstrate interactions, and track every single feedback from the users.
4. Improved communication
Communication is the building block of every organization. Employees should communicate with each other to share ideas, information, and strategies with others and collaboration software allows improved communication.
Using groupware, employees can share content via documents, videos, images, messages, and allow seamless communication. They provide:
› Easy navigation through documents.
› Easy integration with apps like Google Drive, Dropbox, Trello, Hangouts, etc.
› Support voice and video calls
› Availability of various channels for discussions and interaction.
5. Project management and distribution
Managing a single project is easy but when it comes to handling multiple tasks it becomes hectic work. But collaboration software is a helpful tool when it comes to multiple project management. Here’s how collaboration software helps with different levels of management.
› Planning - Groupware does the job that is basically done by the project manager. Where the project manager looks for a detailed plan defining organizational goals and researches the required insights, groupware schedules all the planning stages. The employees can use groupware to share varied ideas with their co-workers which help in building a well-informed and insightful decision making.
› Organizing - Using the collaboration software, the employees can find their skills needed for organizing a specific task. The software helps to divide the special task and then solve queries.
› Coordinating - Various team members and co-workers can coordinate with each other using collaboration software. Also, they can share documents, use the same file collaboratively, and work together. This helps to manage the overall project and meet deadlines without any work errors.
Along with the above work, collaboration software also helps in project monitoring and tracking every single task.
6. Raised Customer Engagement
Every organization is known for its customer service and engagement. With increased technology and remote working playing its part in the work scenario, there is more focus on customer satisfaction and yes the new advancements are completely favoring the side. Collaboration software not only helps in building organizational workflow but also helps in customer engagement.
With improved communication and improvised remote working tactics, the software builds more customer satisfaction thereby resulting in trustworthy customers. With groupware, the employees can note every customer demand, schedule responses, and deliver on-time services to the customers. They can also invite new customers with scheduling regular mails, create brand awareness by generating automatic campaigns and regular interaction.
For example: If you are an account manager and you are assigning a task to a team, you can easily see everybody’s work logging into the software. It is not easy to handle tasks with clients from across the world but you can get your client’s requests quickly without coordinating with other team members and handle everything yourself.
7. Developed security
Today organizations are searching for ways to boost their security grounds, and collaboration software are the essentials granting expert security measures. Since the collaboration software is a secure option even for daily use, most organizations are using them.
The major benefits are different individual needs to have to go through security checks if they need to access files and information.
Collaboration Software And The Organization’s Future
Collaboration applications are definitely the future of organizations. With multi-benefiting purposes and removing outdated, paper-based systems, cloud-based collaboration software is defining the co-existence of timeliness and productivity. With the growing demand of development in organizations, these tech applications are changing the overall workflow of organizations ensuring up-to-date work along with reduced errors and better customer-client relationships.
