Promote collaboration in the company The right tools make the difference
02.06.2021 author /
Editor:
Felix Kugler*
/ Sophie Breuer
In times of home office, the constructive cooperation of different teams comes to the fore. In addition, individual employees or teams often develop their own focus, which is favored by the silo thinking of the departments and little cross-team activity. To overcome the resulting hurdles, you need the right mindset, but also innovative tools.
Companies on the topic
Home office Tools promote constructive cooperation in the company.
In times of home office, the constructive cooperation of different teams comes to the fore. In addition, individual employees or teams often develop their own focus, which is favored by the silo thinking of the departments and little cross-team activity. To overcome the resulting hurdles, you need the right mindset, but also innovative tools.
Due to the spatial separation in the respective home office, you can no longer simply call through the open-plan office or knock at the office door of your colleagues to quickly discuss something on the short commute. Unfortunately, the result is often almost endless meeting marathons, the employees rush from one video conference to the next, instead of really being able to use the peace and quiet in the home office. Here, a lot of time is spent on planning and collusion with each other, which could be better used otherwise. If there are still no suitable tools for data exchange, the long meetings are accompanied by even longer email chains in which documents are sent back and forth and employees quickly lose track. Instead, organizations should implement an intelligent toolset for planning, communication, and content collaboration. According to a study by Atlassian, around 58 percent of employees worldwide believe that their companies need to provide better technologies, systems and tools to work efficiently remotely.
Work Organization 2.0
Among the many changes we are currently experiencing is an expansion of software use to areas that were previously handled more “traditionally” -via analog paper office or Excel lists. The traditional office software that we all use replaced activities that were much more expensive in the pre-digital era. Word processing, spreadsheets and e-mail – high – tech of the 20th century-brought significant productivity advances and easements for employees. Task planning, communication and collaboration, on the other hand, were usually handled very analogously until recently. Now we have the opportunity to apply technology here as well.
Simply mapping the old, analog processes in virtual space leads to the problems mentioned at the beginning and does not represent a satisfactory solution. Today, however, companies want to work agile. The development departments have set the example, providing DevOps as a prime example for new ways of work organization and the close integration of formerly separate departments.
This is where the phrase “you can’t buy DevOps” often fell – DevOps focuses on improved collaboration between different business areas. In order to implement this optimally, there must be a willingness in a company to change something in the work culture. However, if companies provide their employees with certain tools that enable new forms of cooperation, a complete change in the internal work culture can develop independently.
Learning from IT
With the success stories of IT in mind, more and more companies are using agile methods and new tools for collaboration, even in non-technical departments. Atlassian’s Jira product exemplifies this: In the past, it was particularly well-known and popular with developers, but today it is also used in many other areas of the company. The process and project tracking software supports, for example, the planning of sprints and the distribution of tasks to team members. Directly usable Scrum and Kanban Boards are already integrated. Processes can be visualized in the form of workflow flowcharts, whereby the workflows are also individually adaptable. Close integration with other tools is also possible with Jira.
The topic of knowledge management is often a sore point in cross-team communication. If one department hardly knows about the processes in the other, misunderstandings can easily arise. Interfaces between different departments should not lead to prevent efficient work. Regular communication, collaboration in planning and shared knowledge can help to break down silos and ensure that all employees pull together.
The cloud-ideal for home office and a time after
In order for files, information and tools to be seamlessly available everywhere, they must consequently be provided in the cloud. This is the only way to achieve high performance of the services, ensure regular fast updates with low downtimes and employees benefit from the fast provision of new features. This makes companies fit for the future with remote work.
Employees of companies that store data on proprietary servers and host their software on-premise must access company resources through VPN connections. This is troublesome for the workforce and often leads to failures, while the IT department often struggles with scalability. For cloud resources, on the other hand, it doesn’t matter where employees access from. In addition, on-premise software regularly upgrades new functions, which can lead to longer downtime. Since there are large time intervals between the individual upgrades, many new functions come at once, which in turn can lead to frustration among employees. If there are bugs in the software, they usually take until the next update. In the cloud, the releases are smaller, but much more frequent. This leads to smaller gradual changes in the range of functions and bugs can be fixed faster.
Of course, the cloud also has a positive impact on the way employees work: Colleagues can work on documents at the same time, which minimizes unnecessary processing loops and agreements or makes them obsolete. In addition, the greatest possible transparency is created within a team when all team members can track the progress of a document in real time. As a result, transparency throughout the company ultimately increases – different teams gain insight into other projects, which can create synergies. Of course, this transparency does not rule out the possibility that some documents may be granted limited access rights.
Companies are rewarded in the short and long term if they are early adopters of the cloud, which not only offer them faster response times, but ultimately also creates advantages over their market competitors. Advanced collaboration platforms, delivered as software-as-a-service, are key to solving the challenges of a distributed workforce and embedding agile work in the corporate DNA.
* Felix Kugler is Manager Channel DACH & Eastern Europe at Atlassian.
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