Ada Hendren – CEO ShareCreators.
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The The Covid-19 pandemic has led more and more companies to realize that conventional office work often no longer meets the needs of themselves and those of their employees. But whether they have a fully remote workforce or operate on a hybrid model, efficient collaboration has become a major challenge for many enterprises.
When employees across industries and regions work together on tasks, it can often lead to productivity and efficiency issues, especially if you have a large number of digital assets to share. Consequently, your team’s overall progress and synergy can be negatively impacted.
My company is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Beijing and Chengdu in China. In recent years we have worked to closely coordinate our groups at each location. Here’s my advice on how to collaborate efficiently when your teams are telecommuting.
Be prepared to go completely remote during the flight.
When the pandemic hit, many businesses (and employees) were unprepared for remote working. They had to adapt quickly. Many employees are now back in the office, whether it’s all the time or just part of it, but it’s important that enterprises are ready if the need for full remote work ever arises again.
Ask yourself the following questions.
• Are we prepared for an external work environment?
• Have we set up a team collaboration mechanism?
• Have we optimized our team management and collaboration processes?
• Are we willing to communicate effectively with all employees and facilitate cross-departmental communication?
If you can come up with solutions to the above problems, I don’t think going completely remote won’t come as much of a shock.
Clarify your goals.
What does effective teleworking look like for your company? What does clear communication look like for you? Ideally, cross-departmental communication should be just as efficient, and team collaboration should run just as smoothly during telework periods as it does during on-site work. What are your goals when it comes to information? synchronization and transfer of large files?
Split tasks.
One of the most important aspects of remote collaboration is dividing the workload and setting milestones. No one fights alone in a team. When it comes to coordination and division of labor, it is important to plan and split tasks and to assign and manage them effectively.
Be transparent about macro-level tasks. In this way, all people working on a project can clearly understand the situation and your progress, as well as their own part of the project. I have found that this greatly increases participation.
You can use the same process with strategic goals.
Identify your priorities.
Develop your own prioritization system for dealing with problems. Sort your problems by priority and then deal with them in different ways. Perhaps urgent matters can be resolved using instant messaging tools and the most urgent matters can be handled over the phone. The remaining issues that are not time sensitive can be collected and dealt with later. Not every problem needs to be solved right away, and interrupting a If a colleague answers a less urgent question, you will not only disrupt the other person’s progress, but it can also make you look less professional.
Use tools to improve your efficiency.
to paraphrase a old saying often attributed to Confucius: “To do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools.” In our increasingly competitive world, collaboration software is a valuable tool to help companies operate more efficiently and become more competitive.
Today, workplace communication software, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, has become indispensable for enterprises. Such software allows teams to communicate and collaborate effectively.
If you need to share a large number of digital files regularly and efficiently, digital asset management software can help keep them organized and enable easy sharing. There are a number of these software solutions on the market today. (Full disclosure: My company made one.)
There are many factors to consider when choosing digital asset management software. Most asset management software vendors offer trial versions. You can download and try them out before deploying the software company-wide.
While trying different software options, you should first determine whether the functionality of the software meets your current needs. Is the interface clear? Is it complicated to operate? If the software is not easy to learn and understand, you may face many operational problems.
The price of the software is also an important factor. However, I recommend that you focus on whether the software meets the needs of your business, rather than just looking at price.
The quality of the software supplier’s after-sales service also deserves attention. After all, inevitably problems can arise while using software. Does the software vendor provide timely and helpful service? Ideally, they can resolve any issues on their first try.
Conclusion
In general, the biggest obstacle to telecommuting for many companies these days does not seem to be the tools, but rather the need for a rapid shift in management thinking – you have to move from the traditional work mindset to one that embraces innovation and from being a boss. -centric approach to an employee-centric one. This will be mandatory for many enterprises, especially small to medium-sized enterprises. Tools can reduce costs and help you increase efficiency, but only if you use them correctly. Otherwise, they are likely to only increase the burden and pressure on employees and damage the cornerstone of employer-employee trust.
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