Collaborative work can be defined as the willingness of team members to perform individual and collective tasks that meet a common goal. There is nothing new about working together, we do it every day with our co-workers and our bosses. However, it is just as important to be able to work effectively and collaborate with people at a distance ie. online collaborative work. But what is it exactly ? You will find some examples below.
More and more often employees working on the same project are separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometers. It becomes technically complicated and costly to organize meetings to effectively manage a project. The advent of videoconferencing has meant that often people work together for years without ever having actually met. An online collaborative tool has become an essential way of dealing with this challenge, with skills no longer being systematically concentrated in one place.
Email seems to be a simple and economical solution but it has many flaws when it comes to remote collaborative work. Running a project involving several employees requires a specific approach and different courses of action, email becomes redundant when working collaboratively online. Email is inherently unstructured so is unsuited to being used as a collaborative tool, sure there is the possibility of attaching PDFs or other documents but these are sometimes forgotten or cannot be opened at the other end.
It is increasingly difficult via email to have an accurate view of progress on the tasks assigned to employees. As a specialized tool, Planzone offers the opportunity to be kept up to date with the progress of different elements within a project using information assembled and updated in real time. Online collaborative work thus becomes more efficient through real time updating and better distribution of tasks.
Motivation and participation are also essential in the context of remote collaborative work. Lack of actual, physical meetings makes it difficult to foster a good group dynamic, so it’s important to have user-friendly tools to compensate for this lack. Regular messages and targeted information are among the elements that build this momentum and contribute to a powerful synergy. An easy-to-use collaborative tool is obviously also important, complexity will make employees reluctant to use it and can be exacerbated by feeling left out.
Once you are convinced about the usefulness and effectiveness of an online collaborative work tool, you will need to demonstrate the benefits to your employees. This different way of working is relatively new and entails a little adaptation, so spelling out in clear and simple terms how the features work is the best way to win over future users. Taking a personalized training course can really help you grasp how to use the tool itself and how this new way of working online will become the future of professionals all over the world.
Sign up now for the basics of online collaborative work with Planzone! Try it free for 14 days without any obligation and without specifying a method of payment.
