Benefits of Social Collaboration

Collaboration is one of the most important factors to businesses. Mashable explains that companies are more productive, have better employee engagement and save money because of collaborative environments. Additionally, author Jacob Morgan says that collaboration has the greatest impact on business performance because it helps companies solve business problems. This affects business performance up to 36 percent, claims Morgan.

Social Collaboration Tools

Email is a great communication tool, but just is not collaborative. It’s a closed system unlike collaboration tools, which provide group sharing and access to messages, documents, project work, calendar entries and more. There’s no transparency with email unlike these collaboration tools:

• The LG G Flex is one of the latest smartphones, which is crucial for running productivity and networking apps. They help business owners stay on top of business operations and get connected to customers. Furthermore, smartphones allow employees to work from anywhere at anytime. This is especially useful for businesses that require traveling because employees can work from their car, taxi, plane or hotel room. The LG G Flex also offers multitasking features for increased productivity.

• Basecamp is a collaborative project management platform packed with easy-to-use features. These include to-do lists, calendars and discussion threads. It is best suited for group projects.

• Google Apps includes features such as Hangouts for video conferencing, Google Docs for working on documents individually or simultaneously and Calendars for scheduling meetings and reminders.

• Clarizen is a robust project management platform that includes tools like budget management, time tracking, daily webinars, tutorials and computer-based training to improve users’ project management skills.

How to Integrate a Collaboration Tool

Most collaboration tools provide the same basic services. So when deciding which one is best, it is important to understand which advanced features will help you the most. Comparisons are easier with sites like Capterra, which provide information based on user input, ratings, product details, features and product reviews.

Once a social collaboration platform is chosen, technically setting it up with profiles, groups and projects is not difficult. However, your greatest challenge may be convincing people to use it. To successfully implement any changes make sure you have clear communication, support from top management and good instructions about how to work within the new software.