With the UK government once again recommending that employees should work from home, a growing number of companies are now rethinking their ways of working for the long term. Working remotely means adapting to the latest environment, navigating a new set of distractions, and rearranging work and personal life. In order to continue working effectively from home, businesses need to understand, acknowledge and plan for challenges that will help the workforce manage the way that they work.
The biggest obstacle is implementing best practices for remote collaboration. According to a study conducted by Salesforce, 86% of executives and employees believe that the lack of collaboration or ineffective communication is one of the biggest workplace failures. As companies reintroduce remote working, the scope of these challenges will only continue to grow and become more problematic.
With remote collaboration, there are major issues caused by the human to machine interface that often has the effect of dumbing down communications to the lowest common denominator. This is due to the HMI not emulating a ‘natural meeting’ as we would have sat around a table with people and artefacts. This reduces ‘collaborative or cognitive bandwidth’, participants cannot see all of the people and all of the things that they are collaborating with leading to businesses suffering from low team efficiency, poor performance and reduced productivity. For detailed work, the best way to overcome this problem and improve collaboration is by creating an environment that emulates face-to-face, natural meetings, just as though we were sitting around a table with people and things. This is the way that people understand each other best.
Improved team alignment
With 97% of employees stating that a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task, a collaborative working environment is now more important than ever. The ideal vision of a team looks like cogs in a machine, working closely together. However, without effective communication and transparency, this is not possible. By opening the door to natural collaborative meetings, employees are brought together in a far richer way to truly understand the project objectives, their role and how everyone will contribute to achieve results. Coordinating these goals leads to team-wide support, increased productivity and greater innovation for true alignment.
Combining people’s interaction and thinking with a natural virtual meeting environment not only boosts productivity, but aids knowledge sharing and problem solving. By making natural virtual meetings a priority, employees will be able to call on their colleagues for help and will have a better understanding of the processes and methods to streamline remedies. They also have the opportunity to brainstorm together and utilise each other’s capabilities to find a solution to the problem. What’s more, these remote natural meetings allow knowledge to be accessed from anywhere inside or outside the organisation, bringing people together to combine their knowledge, experience and expertise.
Better business flexibility
Similar to team alignment, trust is a natural result of a collaborative workspace. If a team understands its end goal, it can prepare for any situation that arises. In the current climate, change is sure to happen and forecasting that change can often be predictable for a prepared team. When deliberately creating an environment that emulates face-to-face, natural meetings, employees will benefit from those subtleties of human collaborative communication that can deliver innovations that deliver innovations that change the way we live.
In-person interaction and collaboration is under change, meaning many are left grappling with best practices to foster team dynamics, bolster morale and keep productivity alive. In order to continue working efficiently and creating value under these difficult times, businesses need to understand, accept and support specific situations and needs. Frequently employees have no choice but to use tools that don’t have the ability to manage their highly complex tasks. A working environment that combines people’s interaction and thinking with a virtual space to work, will help combat this and unify the entire team across priorities, enabling them to successfully work remotely.
Why collaboration matters
By opening the door to virtual media that actually understand the way people work, organisations will experience benefits from increased team alignment, better productivity and improved innovation, delivering better efficiency and quicker decision making. The richer way of collaborating also allows knowledge to flow anywhere across the organisation, smoothing the flow of communication amongst different teams and across international borders. This is especially important during these unprecedented times, when many teams are working remotely and would benefit from a workspace that emulates a natural meeting to remain productives. For those businesses embracing these work environments for true collaboration, innovation and increased productivity is just a meeting away.
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
By Jocelyn Lomer, Chief Executive of nuVa Enterprises
Jocelyn Lomer is a Chartered Engineer (MIET) with over forty years’ experience in telecommunications and software. He started out as a senior product manager at Cable & Wireless and later at Esprit GTS managing large product portfolios. Since 2000, Jocelyn has owned and run SMEs specialising in virtual meetings, quickly becoming an expert in cognitive technology that enables the competitively advantaged agile organisations of the near future. As an owner of the advanced nuVa Enterprises technology, he has a unique perspective in the next generation of virtual meetings and extensive experience helping businesses implement digital transformation best practices.
