6 Reasons Team Collaboration Should Be at the Top of Your 2017 To-Do List

By Anita Campbell as written on enterprise.microsoft.com

According to a recent informal poll on Twitter, 41% of business owners think that team collaboration is the top benefit of the cloud.

While it may be an informal poll, it helps demonstrate the importance other business owners place on team collaboration.

But what’s behind that belief?  Lots of good reasons.

Here are six reasons you should make team collaboration a major priority.

Drive More Efficiency

Team collaboration can help your business achieve more in less time by working from anywhere allowing you to be mobile while still having access to important tools and files. For example, say you’re at the airport on your way to an important meeting.

Without the proper tools, catching up with that extra work you had back at the office is out of the question and sitting around at the airport is just wasted time.

But what if you could access all those important files and work on them from your smartphone or tablet? They’re not sitting on your office computer. They’re in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere.

Or say you’re filling in for a co-worker who’s out on vacation. You’re helping a few of her clients and without the cloud might not have access to their files. But with cloud technology those files are all available to anyone in your company, which makes jumping in a breeze.

Manage Employees

Hiring remote workers can help your business find the best employees because you’re not bound by geography. It also gives team members a level of flexibility many employees are looking for in a workplace today.

But if you’re not in the same office as someone on a day-to-day basis, managing and working together can be difficult.

Cloud collaboration tools can be absolutely vital with distributed teams — or even for people who work down the hall.

With team collaboration tools in the cloud like Microsoft Teams, the chat-based workspace for Office 365 and others, you can work on projects together, communicate back and forth, assign different tasks and check on your team’s progress.

Increase Profit for the Business

Team collaboration also allows you to potentially increase your business’s profits. Think about it – if you’re able to cut down on inefficiencies around your office and allow each of your team members to focus on what they do best, your business is likely to get more done. And when you’re not spending all that extra time on those tasks, you can focus on things that actually move your business forward.

For example, David Smith, Microsoft’s VP of worldwide SMB sales shared a case study about Holwick Constructors in a recent Twitter chat. According to Smith, the company was spending about 12 unnecessary hours on IT each week. But when it began utilizing the cloud for team collaboration, all that recouped time led to an estimated $2 million in additional business.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

When you’re able to increase efficiency among your employees, it can also lead to an improved experience for your customers. For example, if you have just a few employees who are in charge of customer service, they might not be able to dedicate as much time as they’d like to each customer or situation. However, if you have a team collaboration system in place like Outlook Customer Manager, it can streamline your team’s communication and spread out some of the tasks necessary in order to provide great service to every customer.

In fact, many businesses have already found that technology like cloud-based collaboration tools have helped them improve customer satisfaction. According to another tweet from Smith, 44 percent of small business owners surveyed said that cloud and mobile technology has led to increased satisfaction among their customers.

Streamline Your Communications

With a team collaboration system in place, your team members never have to wonder about how they should go about contacting you or another member of the team. In other cases, an employee with a question or idea might have to consider whether they should email you, set up an appointment or share their concerns in another way.

But if you have a system like Skype for Business in place, where everyone on your team can work together and stay in contact, it can make sharing ideas or concerns a lot easier for everyone. This can save everyone on your team time, both when they have questions or concerns and when they have to answer questions or concerns from others.

Make Employees More Satisfied

When your employees are able to work together seamlessly and do work that is well suited to their particular set of skills, it can make the whole experience a lot more enjoyable. And that can lead to increased job satisfaction throughout your team.

There are many tangible benefits to having happier employees. Those who are satisfied with their jobs are likely to be more productive and engaged at work. And they’re also likely to stick around for longer periods of time, meaning you can potentially even reduce employee turnover and save on HR costs. It’s a win-win!