Digital collaboration is an important tool that is relevant to any organization. Even with the pandemic in full swing, it has become even more clear that the digital approach for collaborating is how they can manage teams and streamline productivity. It is one of the fundamental factors in making employees feel valued about their jobs. Digital collaboration can lead to an increase in employee satisfaction by 17% and employee engagement at 19%.
Digital Collaboration
This refers to the process of using digital methods and technology to collaborate with people with different areas of expertise. Following are the tools being used for digital collaboration:
- Webinars e.g. Zoom
- Teams
- Google Notes
- Shared to-do lists
In a case when working together with another expert isn’t possible, digital collaboration technology has got their backs. One may be working in an office that includes other remote workers, or he may be working in an office that is in another country. Or maybe his whole company is working from home. Whatever the case, digital collaboration technology allows one to communicate via video calls, share documents, broadcast presentations, etc.
What Do You Need For Digital Collaboration?
For digital collaboration to go as smoothly as possible, one needs a working internet connection. We recommend that for smooth and seamless videoconferencing, one must have at least 5-10 Mbps download speeds and 5 Mbps or higher upload speeds. Most internet plans such as Xfinity Internet Plans have download speeds starting from 50 Mbps, which is more than enough for an uninterrupted video conference call. Though you also might need to keep other factors like the number of devices in a household because that could interfere with the internet connection. Thus, for carrying out smooth digital collaboration, a good internet connection must also be considered.
Benefits Of Digital Collaboration
The technology of digital collaboration leads to improved communication, document management, content management, and flow of information across the company, resulting in improved employee productivity. This technology has introduced a range of features for enhanced user experiences from all ends, such as desktop sharing, where you can share the screen of your desktop with other users, whiteboards for demonstration, polls to vote on, etc. Other benefits of using digital collaboration include:
Travel Cost Savings
The biggest tangible benefit that comes from using digital collaboration is that one can save and manage travel costs for a large chunk of his training budget. It can get quite tedious for a company to arrange traveling costs along with training sessions for their employees. With web-enabled collaboration tools, their employees do not have to travel to attend the training session. Rather they can utilize the recording and saving functions built into these digital collaboration tools, instead of covering large distances for their learning.
Communication Cost Savings
Other cost savings include communication costs from phone calls, snail mail, etc. which were typically used as tools of communication to reach out to geographically spread-out audiences, in the absence of digital collaboration tools. One only needs to log into a single platform to attend the session with many others. Such facilities of chatting and direct calling benefits learner by addressing their needs right there.
Access to Knowledge
The digital collaboration tools make it easier for learners or employees to have access to first-hand knowledge about their area of expertise. Through collaboration, learners can arrange brainstorming sessions and file-sharing much quicker than the traditional mode of communication.
Access to Experts
Learner employees can stay connected to the experts within the organizations with the help of digital collaboration tools. This gives them a chance to interact with industry experts and gain experiences by learning from them. Learners can even share their own queries over the platform and receive answers from the experts immediately. They can also attend sessions and talks organized by experts.
Increase in Employee Satisfaction
All these benefits result in employee satisfaction. When learner employees are happy with the provision of facilities to enhance their learning experiences within the company, they can have better faith in their company and are willing to commit to excellence in the quality of their work.
The benefits alone say a lot about why companies should rely on digital collaboration tools. It allows remote employees to communicate with other users and work together in a streamlined manner, resulting in improved efficiency in professional behavior and productivity. Hence, digital collaboration is an ideal platform for businesses that are forward-thinking in nature. It fosters the creation of ideas, along with encouraging a more stress-free work environment.