Communication & Collaboration apps can be a game changer

With digital transformation, workplace communication & collaboration apps have become indispensable in maximising communication.

Collaboration & communication is integral to success of a business. Considerable amount of time is spent by employees in collaborating with co-workers. Technology is rapidly changing the way people communicate and collaborate at work. A decade ago emails & chats were the only tools used for work, all other communication and collaboration generally happened over meetings or brainstorming sessions.

To share real time message & information, most of the workplace communication is happening to through mobile devices by using informal chat services like whatsApp or SMS. Is it a good idea to use these services if you want to keep your work information confidential, safe & secure? If your employees are using these services for business communication, they are exposing your company to serious leaks and security risks. Moreover, it is difficult to control who has access to group chats, whoever creates them does, so cannot be managed. In case employees are hesitant to share their private number with other employees, they will not join these groups nor become part of the communication or information being shared on the group.

On the other hand companies are heavily dependent on in-house applications & systems for communication, collaboration & productivity. Every team or department will be using some application like HR will be into CRM software and business team will be using an application to manage their schedule & projects and so on. However there is no unified & shared space for the entire organization to communicate & collaborate on and with different, disjointed in house applications communication becomes all the more scattered and teams are siloed.

Hence with digital transformation, workplace communication & collaboration app have become indispensable in maximising communication. We are flooded with communication & collaboration platforms, some designed to do general things others cater specific industries. Some are project-management platforms others messaging platforms or productivity software. So how does one choose?

First we need to understand no single platform or application can meet all needs of an organization. What you need is a platform that allows deep integration to all your existing in-house applications & other third-party tools at one place and also comes with in-built features essential to your workplace needs. For effective collaboration it is imperative that interface is simple & easy to navigate for a last mile employee and a manager alike to make sure all employees get the right information at the right time on the most ubiquitous device they own - the Smartphone. Also keep in mind the platform is equipped with best security features that offer data security, compliance and control and is cloud based.