Why real-time collaboration tools are so important.

Instant feedback.

If your organisation creates products or delivers services, then gathering feedback from staff and customers is crucial to deliver a competitive product or service. Approximately 14% of an executive’s time is spent managing email. Most of the time, when gathering feedback about a product or service, we will email the relevant parties, and await their response. This delays projects progressing. Real-time collaboration solutions provide a platform for everyone, no matter where they are, to share information, and give instantaneous feedback. Allowing projects to progress and help meet the deadlines.

Productivity.

Productivity follows instant feedback nicely. In addition to gathering instant feedback, real-time collaboration solutions allow people to work together on a project. No longer are meetings used to only discuss ideas, and then everyone goes back to their desks and work on the project in silos. Real-time collaboration solutions allow work to actually get done during meetings, as though everyone is in the same room.

User adoption.

Research shows that people who work remotely, lack human connectedness, and can often feel isolated and out of the loop. Real-time collaboration solutions can help bridge the gap between remote workers and traditional office workers, by allowing those remote workers to feel as though they are in the same room with their colleagues. There are solutions that allow remote employees to easily communicate, and share content. Only if these solutions are effective, will your employees utilise it. If a solution is complicated and clunky, user adoption will not happen.

Information is up-to-date.

There’s nothing worse than receiving a document to work on, delaying it a few days, adding your edits, then realising the person who sent it to you a few days previously has made more changes to it. Real-time collaboration solutions ensure that the information you are working on, is up to date. Solutions like real-time workspaces, allow people, no matter their location, work together on the same content, in real-time. Once they’ve finished, the content will be saved, ready to pick up where it was left off – other by the same people, or by their colleagues who are responsible for the next stage of the project.

Knowledge sharing.

For as long as we can remember, a person has a role, and are capable of producing outstanding results individually. This is sometimes still the case today. So why would a person need to collaborate with others in real-time when he or she can simply do the work alone? The answer is knowledge sharing. The old saying “two heads are better than one” is popular for a reason. Employees can learn a lot from their colleagues, thus broadening their knowledge base and skillset. This in turn is a huge benefit for the organisation. If a member of the team leaves suddenly, there’s less of a gap in knowledge, as someone else has been collaborating with them in real-time, and has picked up knowledge, skills, and information. They can pick up where the resigned person has left off, and bridge that gap until a new employee is recruited.

Real-time collaboration solutions are getting better all the time, and whilst businesses can keep going the way they’re going, they simply won’t get the job done efficiently and effectively without the help of real-time technology.

The Huffington Post states that real-time collaboration is well on its way to becoming standard practice.