Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
6 Ways a Collaboration Software Can Improve Your Business Operations
Guest Post | Dec 29, 2020
Teams today -- particularly those forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to work remotely -- struggle with adjusting and simplifying their collaboration process.
If you’re struggling with the same thing, know that no matter your team and business size, you can work things out with helpful collaboration software (also known as groupware).
See how collaboration tools help you accomplish several tasks and improve the implementation of your business operations:
1. Streamlines workflows and supervision
Collaboration solutions streamline your operations and business processes. They let you plan and visualize the execution through listing tasks by phase, indicating deadlines and financial details, updating, and putting all other relevant information in place.
The tools can present an overview where you understand your operations’ general progress and the direction they are headed toward. They also show you what you need to prioritize focusing and spending on.
You can even choose to view your projects in different formats: in kanban boards, timelines, lists, and others -- depending on the tools’ available features and design.
Additionally, collaboration solutions vary by project management style. They usually suit remote agile teams who need flexibility for their dynamic working orientation, order to guide task execution, and transparency on assignment status.
Collaboration tools have a user-friendly interface, drag-and-drop features, and other nifty task management functionalities -- making supervision over your operations and team performance more straightforward and systematic.
2. Helps identify the right person for the job
Delegating assignments to the right people can produce moments of indecision, especially if you have, say, over 50 employees. This leaves you with plenty of options and factors to consider, such as their availability, expertise, and others.
Running through papers or digital pages of their employee profiles only eats up your working hours if you do that every time you assign tasks.
See: The Enterprise Automation Imperative—Why Modern Societies Will Need All the Productivity They Can Get
Collaboration tools make that more convenient. They allow your workforce to create profiles and list their skills, designation in the team, and other details. Whether through built-in capabilities or app integrations, these software programs also keep a record of employees' shift schedules, possible labor costs, deadlines, etc.
Collaborative tools can then apply artificial intelligence or other functions to examine all your preferences, required factors, and available employee data and give you the best options for who can take the job.
This helps you make the best delegating decisions faster and more effectively.
3. Organizes schedules and timelines
Poor scheduling leads to wasted time, money, and other resources -- which is why collaboration tools are critical to improving business operations. They help you establish, manage, and arrange your meetings, appointments, employee schedules, project timelines, and other activities.Daily, weekly, and monthly scheduling with these tools, along with determining your goals, helps you and your team get things done on time and in just one to a few clicks. Asana, for instance, offers calendars.
While you can manually set timetables on your collaboration tools, automating them boosts your productivity as it lets you optimize and hasten your scheduling tasks. For example, project and resource management solution LiquidPlanner has automated scheduling features that reassign tasks when workers can’t make it to their shifts.
4. Enhances communication lines
How do you communicate tasks, assignment details, and deadlines to your team members? What medium do you use to coordinate with them?
Companies typically use email, but messaging on that channel can become inefficient and disorganized. As you email back and forth, details eventually get buried in email threads and along with other conversations in your inbox. It is also not the best medium for getting answers to quick questions and interacting dynamically with your team.
See: How regulatory collaboration transformed markets
This makes collaboration software tools a much better alternative. They have features designed to make team coordination seamless, such as comments to published tasks, chatbox, mentions or tags for specific persons (and receiving alerts for that), and others.
Project management tools mentioned earlier have these features. Another option is internal communication platforms such as Slack.
Through collaborative and internal communication platforms, you and your team can get speedier replies and clarification than email, minimizing chances for communication delay and breakdown.
5. Stores files neatly and securely
Projects and business processes involve volumes of documentation -- from portfolios to contracts, operational timetables, reports on progress, findings, and incidents, and many more.
Everyone in your team handles materials related to their duties, copies of which may be given to other workers. All these make up your documentation, and their volume grows over time.
Without proper filing storage, particularly online, anyone looking for files will waste more time than is necessary rummaging through file cabinets, piles of papers, or email threads.
Thankfully, collaboration software programs have secure, centralized document repositories and knowledge bases that you can maximize for easier file searching and dissemination.
Collaboration software tools offer your team robust features to attach, forward, find, store, and sort your digital materials neatly and quickly online. These solutions can also integrate with existing file creation and storage tools you are already using, such as Dropbox and Google Docs.
In this way, you create order in your documentation management, and your team can attend to more business-critical operations, boosting their efficiency and productivity. Plus, in this way, you help your employees manage their most precious commodity -- time.
6. Ensures balanced workloads
By helping you supervise your workflows and deadlines, collaboration software tools ensure your team has balanced work volumes and schedules.
You can track whether you assigned a team member too many tasks that are good for two persons to achieve and too few responsibilities to the others.
Managing workloads is critical to your business because overloading tasks can yield a domino effect: overtime, physical and mental fatigue, unproductivity, tendering resignations, lower employee satisfaction and retention, tarnished brand image, and so on.
See: UK banks publish fintech collaboration toolkit
Collaboration software, especially when integrated with employee scheduling apps, will allow you and your team to negotiate and reassign tasks and shifts. This results in evenly divided labor and contribution in meeting targets, better efficiency, and productivity.
Maximize collaboration software for your business operations.
Collaboration software powerfully impacts your business processes' efficiency by improving your team's engagement and coordination -- especially if they're working remotely.
Maximize these tools to boost team performance and accomplish more tasks, leading to profitability and reaching your business goals over time.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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