The new world of work has definitely changed the way we communicate and collaborate. As employees work from multiple locations, companies must establish new technology infrastructures to support at least three of her working modes: in-office, hybrid, and remote. M-Files Founder and CEO Antti Nivala explains how to build a system that enables seamless communication and collaboration in a work-from-anywhere environment.
While many people find remote and hybrid work liberating, there are still some unanswered questions, such as how companies effectively communicate in today’s work-from-anywhere world. What is the office environment in the cloud era? How can you empower employees in vastly different time zones?
The answer all comes down to culture. You can’t just send your employees laptops and expect them to be able to communicate effectively with their colleagues. A cultural shift within the business is required, supported by a document management platform that fosters collaboration and communication.
Steve Jobs once said: They are done by teams of people. So how can forward-thinking companies achieve these “great things” by fostering better communication and collaboration within their work-from-anywhere organizations?
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Challenge anytime, anywhere
Employees also choose their working hours because they are free from office restrictions and restrictions. This is facilitating a shift to asynchronous collaboration as the American workforce continues to spread across time zones to his teams remotely.
Knowledge workers need to be able to collaborate anytime from virtually any device, but that change presents a daunting challenge. For example, not only are knowledge workers distributed, but so are documents and data.according to findings According to findings from Wakefield Research and Elastic, 1 in 5 US knowledge workers report finding relevant information as their primary problem when working remotely. Employees are often unable to access critical documents due to the lack of a collaborative and easy-to-use information management system and use outdated versions of documents to share documents via email.
Unlocking information and enabling employees to share information easily and securely is essential for businesses to get more done in an ‘always-on’ world. But you can’t if your important information is still locked up on a hard drive somewhere in your data silo or office. The first step is to leverage a document management platform to connect all critical data to a single source of truth, giving all employees access to the information they need, when they need it. . The second step facilitates different types of content collaboration, such as ad-hoc peer review of notes, co-authoring of large reports with teams, structured reviews, approvals, and publication of contract or project deliverables. is to All of these examples can be achieved anytime and anywhere, not only within your organization, but also to improve communication with your customers and partners.
Promote information sharing
In a world where work can be done from anywhere, information sharing is changing. Employees can no longer tap shoulders to ask questions or go to someone’s office for help. Leaders must find ways to extrapolate the information they have in their heads and make it available to the wider organization. This can be achieved at the individual, team, or company level using a variety of mechanisms such as coaching, daily meetings, project retrospectives, and all-hands sessions. Each of these lends itself to a particular type of information sharing, and when implemented systematically builds towards a culture of sharing.
All of these can be taken to the next level with the help of proper document management. At the most basic level, this means simply storing all the content of the above activities in one central repository. This includes recordings of all-hands sessions. In a more proactive approach, collecting lessons learned can be a necessary (or rewarding) step before completing a project. Finally, some organizations implement a systematic knowledge capture process to identify documents for reuse and submit them to a corporate knowledge bank.
Another aspect of successful information sharing is the ease of content discovery. It starts with having documents that are transparent and easily accessible from a technical and access rights perspective so that all employees of the company can access and learn from the information available. Document management systems continue to classify and tag information in ways that facilitate discovery. Relying on metadata-driven architectures, these systems make it easy for individuals to find the information they need. You can search for documents based on their content and relevance rather than where they are stored.
This additional documentation can be tedious in some cases. While some executives may be concerned about the high level of transparency that work-from-anywhere organizations need to succeed, geographic flexibility should be considered. It also captures organizational institutional knowledge into tangible assets that are not tied to individuals.
Supports brainstorming, problem solving and learning
This new work-from-anywhere world has also opened up possibilities for brainstorming and problem-solving. Traditionally, brainstorming sessions were held in conference rooms, but geographic location and time constraints prevented some employees from participating. Now conducted via video calls and shared documents, team members can leave questions, suggestions and ideas to collaborate with team members in other time zones at their convenience. This encourages more creative collaboration, such as sharing early-stage ideas, documents, or plans, and makes employees more open to feedback. It can also reduce the pressure of delivering sophisticated work as opposed to having to attend a more formal sync session.
Another way to make your business more collaborative, efficient and dynamic is by providing access to learning potential. In addition to comprehensive onboarding processes and information libraries, organizations should help employees succeed by offering in-house learning and self-development courses that employees can take anytime, anywhere. This allows employees to not only achieve what they were hired for, but to take them to the next level.
Working from anywhere may present hurdles for an organization at first, but with the right strategy, organizational processes, technology and leadership, many companies, teams and functions can be a business plus. , can facilitate more effective collaboration and communication.
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