Collaboration is not just nice, it is the only way many businesses can afford to keep the lights on. Understanding that truth makes it important to find the right strategies and technologies to support your staff’s collaborative endeavors. Today, we take a look at a few options to help improve your business’ collaboration. 

Change Your Support Strategies

At many businesses, production workers also function as the support team. Now, up until recently, there weren’t many choices and the loss of productivity you would see from support-related tasks was just something you had to put up with. But what if you could move those support hours off your production team? It would certainly help your business as long as you can find other solutions to handle support. Here are three ways you can get your support responsibilities off your production staff:

• A rotating support schedule - You may not have to get support off of your whole staff. You could simply just rotate the people who need to work support. Some will be better than others, but by doing so it ensures that your customer support responsibilities are covered and you don’t have multiple workers dealing with it.
• Hire new workers for support - Support is extremely important but it doesn’t really bring in the bacon. If you hire a dedicated support person, you could keep your best workers doing what they do and have a dedicated support professional to handle customer concerns. 
• Use technology - Using AI is now a very viable option. Artificially-intelligent platforms can be programmed to handle organizational support queries effectively. This keeps the amount of human resources involved with support to a minimum. 

Voice over Internet Protocol

A VoIP platform can present a lot of really solid options for collaboration, while also substantially cutting down your company’s communications costs. Instead of having a stand-alone contract with the phone company, the VoIP platform gives you the ability to use your Internet bandwidth to provide your staff with the crystal-clear telephone services they need to do their jobs, while also giving them access to some powerful collaboration tools such as instant messaging and video conferencing. 

Cloud-Hosted Collaboration Tools

Today, some of the top software companies have developed tools that integrate communication tools, productivity tools, and project management tools into one single piece of software. Regardless of what platform a business uses, however, it should be noted that it is all in a concerted effort to build a collaborative workforce in a time when a lot of their human resources need remote access.

Whether your organization chooses to utilize collaboration apps or simply software that provides your team the ability to produce resources for your employees together inside the same file, embracing collaboration is a strategy that will allow you to do more with less, maximizing your employees’ time and efforts. This is especially true if you’ve chosen to roll out new workplace strategies that allow workers to work from home.

Getting your organization to a place where employees know that they need to work together to get where they want to go requires a hard look at your processes and your tools. The IT professionals at Apex Technology can help. Give us a call today at (704) 895-0010 to have a conversation about collaboration.