If you perform a search for the characteristics of a highly collaborative team, you’ll find some 250 million results, with any number of definitions. But amongst the deltas in how different reports or blogs define it, a few commonalities remain. Highly collaborative teams tend to:
- Act inclusively and aligned by a common goal
- Understand how to work together to accomplish tasks
- Have clear processes, developed workflows, and agreed upon tools
These characteristics can be intrinsic to the culture of a business. They might also be attributed to the ability of the team to mesh together. And though these points are well documented, collaboration also requires the right technologies to bring out the best in teams.
Industry thought leaders are now redefining how IT teams can leverage business communication tools to power highly collaborative organizations:
Frost and Sullivan on eliminating geographic borders
“Today’s globalized and distributed high tech teams need modern UCC (Unified Communications & Collaboration) tools that connect them better internally as well as with external parties. Seamless content sharing and video conferencing allow teams to bring ideas to life by meeting face-to-face to brainstorm and share concepts regardless of their location or time zones.”
No Jitter describing the phases to enabling pervasive collaboration
“Think of collaboration at the use case level…and focus on specific types of end users involved. Look for the use pain points and investigate how collaboration tools can reduce or eliminate them. This helps define specific instructional requirements and improved adoption by end users.”
Aragon Research on enabling teams with the choice of how to connect
“…collaboration is synonymous with seamless communications; it enables both voice and video-based calls, meetings, and mobile messaging, which Aragon has termed Team Collaboration. With so many channels of communication, the next step is for devices to unburden the human with the task of choosing the best way to connect with people at a given time.”
The path forward for IT
Enterprises have teams scattered across locations and time zones, and it’s up to IT teams to fill in the gaps. Whether a user is a desk, mobile, or contract worker, offering them access to seamless modes of effective collaboration in the workplace is more important than ever to eliminate friction and kill silos. It’s no longer enough to simply have a communications platform that works—the new era of business communications is marked by the persistence of voice, messaging, and video conferencing on any device. Instant access to all these collaboration channels on one platform is the antidote to productivity loss, and a critical backbone of the modern enterprise IT stack.
To learn more about RingCentral and how you can drive innovation in your organization with modern cloud communications, read on here.
Originally published Jul 09, 2019, updated Sep 28, 2020
