Conferencing Tools Build a Collaboration Culture

How to Conferencing Tools Help Build a Collaboration Culture in Your Business

Looking to improve the spirit of teamwork in your organization?

Collaboration has been shown to be extremely beneficial to businesses and their employees. For example, a few compelling benefits include: engaged employees, better retention, increased profitability,productivity gains, more productive meetings, improved innovation, andincreased business velocity. However, fostering collaboration is not as simpleas sending out an email telling your team to collaborate. It requires acompany-wide mindset shift as well as tools to facilitate it. Here are someways audio and video conferencing can help.

  • Use collaborative technology — Tools like Slack andTrello have become mainstream, but they’re not the only collaborative tools toconsider. With today’s mobile and remote workforce, audio, video, and webconferencing are a must. Audio conferencing is a convenient, all-around choicefor discussions, questions and answers, status updates, and other groupmeetings. Video conferencing adds the ability to see one another face to face,which is particularly important for virtual teams where team members may neverinteract in person. Video and web conferencing are other great collaborationtools for remote teams, especially when it’s necessary to share screens, watchvideos together, or share files.
  • Create shared goals — Think about your organization’s current incentive program. Does it incentivize individual or group effort? It’s natural for employees to focus on their individual goals, but that can interfere with collaboration. In contrast, shared goals encourage collaboration. So, gather your team in an audio conference and find that common ground.
  • Recognize, share skills,and break down silos — Everyone has something of value to offer, but others may notrealize it. Barbara in accounting, for example, may be a Photoshop whiz. If it makes sense, invite her to your next marketing conference call and get her input. While you may not want her pulled from her main accounting tasks, her Photoshop skills may be of value to the marketing department periodically. Encouraging cross-functional collaboration could be beneficial. Likewise, encourage the sharing of information across departments. This helps reinforce the shared goals, helps everyone understand their role in the greater scheme ofthings, and provides opportunities for further sharing and brainstorming. Itcan also reduce the potential for redundancy.

Lead by example — Initially, you may need to assign collaborative tasks to your team, helping them to shift from individual to group work. Likewise, show your team how important collaboration is by openly collaborating with others, hosting collaborative video or audio conferences, and sharing credit with your collaborators.

Make it easy — While technology can help foster collaboration, if it’s too complicated, your plan will backfire. An elaborate video conferencing platform requiring specialized hardware and technical skills won’t get used nearly as often as a simple, user-friendly desktop video tool that works from a web browser.

Examples of Conferencing Tools

US/Canada Conferencing Service

International Conference Call Service

Video/Web Conferencing Service

Conferencing Tools enabling Communication is the backbone of collaboration. Without it, everyone is back in their own private silos, doing their own thing. Our audio, video, and web conferencing plans offer an affordable, convenient, and user-friendly way for your employees to communicate and collaborate — whether they’re in the same building, city, state, or country or in an office on the other side of the world. With the right mindset and conferencing tools, you can build a culture of collaboration in your organization.

Conferencing Tools