What is social collaboration and why should you care?

Q: FAQ

You will find here Frequently Asked Questions about collaboration with all the answers in one place.

Q: What is social collaboration?

Social collaboration was born as an answer to significant changes happening in the modern business environment. Companies are now more than ever looking for growth, competitive advantages, responsiveness, efficiency and innovation. On the other hand, the tech evolution and the expansion of social media have radically changed the way companies and employees communicate and interact internally with each other as well as externally with customers and partners. Describing “ social collaboration ” in a one-sentence definition would be restrictive and would not do this notion justice. With the benefits of social collaboration having been addressed in previous posts, this one will focus instead on the emerging strategic objectives of social collaboration in organizations today. ➝ See the full definition of social collaboration

On the other hand, the tech evolution and the expansion of social media have radically changed the way companies and employees communicate and interact internally with each other as well as externally with customers and partners.

Social collaboration definition – Describing “social collaboration” in a one-sentence definition would be restrictive and would not do this notion justice. With the benefits of social collaboration having been addressed in previous posts, this one will focus instead on the emerging strategic objectives of social collaboration in organizations today.

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New stimulus for growth

Social collaboration has emerged as a new opportunity to introduce a new stimulant for meeting the company’s growth objective through its ability to boost employee efficiency and productivity and to take knowledge management to the next level.

As an example of this, employees can have unprecedented easy access to a network of experts who can easily and more openly start to contribute the right skills in the right contexts through formal or informal internal collaboration channels. Each activity is captured and made into a new piece of knowledge stored and organized in a place where everybody knows where to look.

With this ability to promote cross-functional collaboration, it will be so easy for a salesperson, as an example, to put a financial team member, a marketing expert and a technical consultant into a space of cooperation to comment, suggest improvements or validate an urgent document or an RFP whether they are in the same office, in another location or on the move.

The value generated at the end of the day in terms of employee productivity and the generation and flow of internal knowledge now work in line with the company’s vision for its own growth.

A driver for innovation

Social collaboration is not just a platform but also a work culture. People are more compelled to share ideas on a platform that offers them the opportunity to promote their knowledge and involvement.

Through enabling the birth of communities of interest or practice, experts can share and discuss ideas. All employees are able to stay up to date on relevant departmental or cross-departmental business operations where they are more likely to detect new ideas that can help their own work tasks, processes, products and services. This in turn helps the organization evolve and get a better competitive advantage.

When a social collaboration platform and work culture both become available in an organization, it encourages new ideas, gives it higher visibility and opens a clearer pathway toward those who can turn ideas to innovations that can benefit the organization.

Empowered cost control

Efficient company communication, transparency, a solid sense of belonging and active talent recognition have a direct impact on employee turnover and are some of the key reasons why some of today’s most successful companies are where they are.

Our mention above of crowd-sourced knowledge, for instance, can be looked at from a cost-reduction perspective with its effect of lowering employee training costs where employee onboarding becomes less expensive because information and knowledge become easily findable and usable.

Other more direct cost-saving opportunities for social collaboration include travel costs for remote workers and telecommunication invoices. And because time is money, social cooperation also directly helps reduce the time spent by employees on dealing with email overload and attending face-to-face meetings.

An enabler of transformation

Social collaboration plays a role in facilitating the transformation and development of organizations. It provides the ability to effectively integrate internal and external feedback channels and customer expectations in operations and allows efficient aggregation of information to better address the market in which the organization wants to thrive.

From the point of view of the organization’s top management, social collaboration integrated with the company’s key processes provides an opportunity to be aware of what is happening in the organization and to initiate the necessary changes or take them into consideration under their vision for transformation. It also enables them to effectively lead these changes by being closer to their employees and more aware of their aspirations and expectations.

As we can see, each strategic objective can be broken down into goals that play an active role in helping achieve said objectives by the organization. A social collaboration solution provides a centerpiece for a digital workplace where these goals can be achieved, helping companies to succeed in this challenge.

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FAQ

You will find here Frequently Asked Questions about collaboration with all the answers in one place.

What is social collaboration?

Social collaboration was born as an answer to significant changes happening in the modern business environment. Companies are now more than ever looking for growth, competitive advantages, responsiveness, efficiency and innovation. On the other hand, the tech evolution and the expansion of social media have radically changed the way companies and employees communicate and interact internally with each other as well as externally with customers and partners.

Describing “social collaboration” in a one-sentence definition would be restrictive and would not do this notion justice. With the benefits of social collaboration having been addressed in previous posts, this one will focus instead on the emerging strategic objectives of social collaboration in organizations today.

➝ See the full definition of social collaboration

What are the benefits of social collaboration?

It provides the ability to effectively integrate internal and external feedback channels and customer expectations in operations and allows efficient aggregation of information to better address the market in which the organization wants to thrive.

Here are some benefits of social collaboration:

➝ Find out the benefits of social collaboration and why you should care

What is collaboration?

Collaboration is “the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing”.

➝ See the full definition of collaboration

What are the different types of collaboration in business?

Here are some definitions of digital workplace:

Team collaboration
Cross-departmental and interdisciplinary collaboration
Community collaboration
Strategic partnerships and alliances
Supply chain collaboration

➝ Find out the different types of collaboration in business

How to choose the best type of collaboration?

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?

➝ Find out How to choose the best type of collaboration

Why collaboration is important?

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.

➝ Find out why collaboration is important

What are the benefits of collaboration in the workplace?

Here are some of the benefits of collaboration in the workplace:

➝ Find out the benefits of collaboration in the workplace

Tags: Digital workplace, Internal communication, Collaboration, intranet

Julian dubois

Je suis expert solution chez eXo Platform.

Mon rôle est d’accompagner les clients dans le déploiement de leur projet de plateforme et l’accompagnement au changement lié à ce projet. J’ai piloté et administré une Digital Workplace pendant 3 ans avant de rejoindre eXo Platform.

Améliorer l’environnement et les conditions de travail m’a toujours passioné, je peux maintenant accompagner nos clients dans cette démarche.

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