When I “pitch” my company to relations and friends at social gatherings, I often get the question: “But what can you use it (social collaboration) for at work?” I thought it would be a good idea to blog about a couple of examples from my personal and our clients’ experiences.
Personally, I use our social network at work daily. What do I do with it?
When I have an idea that I’d like to submit for brainstorming, or I have a question that I feel could benefit several people, I post it, usually in the relevant team space. Sometimes, a conversation emerges with several people answering and we take actions as a result. Sometimes, it just gets thrown “out there”, and I use it to find the idea later.
Any time someone from any of my teams uploads a report, answers one of my questions, starts a conversation, or pretty much does anything useful, I see it in my activity stream. And I can filter the stream view by team or project, so I can get a quick glance of each team’s work.
From time to time, I like communicating about the company’s successes internally (good financial results, for example), or publicly congratulate a team on an achievement. I do this by posting a message on our social intranet.
This is not a daily activity, obviously. But whenever I need a group of people to do something over a length of time, I organize a digital workspace and invite relevant people from within the company and from outside. This is especially handy, as we are all in different locations across the globe. Also, I do not like being limited by geography when sourcing a helpful set of skills – one of our external content writers is located in South Africa, for example.
I recently needed some security management input for one of our prospects. Being high in the hierarchy gives me the advantage that I can ping a senior colleague and burden them with it. But it is actually quicker (because of the different time zones) to search for someone with the right skill listed in their company profile and ping this person directly.
The above list is not meant to be exhaustive; it is a very personal list. One use that I left out, but that is relevant to a lot of our clients, is – networking. I don’t need to do this inside the company, as I do not need to work on my mobility or career advancement. However, I definitely should network more within our tribe!
All in all, I feel social collaboration is a great and modern way of working in teams and including people in the management thought processes.
What about you? Do you use social collaboration in your company? What system do you use to collaborate?
Types of Digital workplace solutions
The modern workplace has evolved significantly in recent years, with advancements in technology, the growing number of tools …
You will find here Frequently Asked Questions about collaboration with all the answers in one place.
Collaboration is “the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing”.
Here are some definitions of digital workplace:
In order to effectively find the right type of collaboration for your business, you have to follow a strategic approach and answer three common yet critical questions: Where are we? Where do we want to be? And how to get there?
At the internal level, businesses try to encourage and seek to incorporate different forms of collaboration in the workplace to lay the foundations for teams to be able to work together with an aim to achieve higher levels of success.
Externally, businesses look to engage in collaborative actions to benefit from others’ expertise, to gather the opinions of their customer base and to get customers and other stakeholders more involved in the development of products and services.
Here are some of the benefits of collaboration in the workplace:
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