A survey conducted by Salesforce.com in 2012 discovered that 86 percent of employees and executives cited lack of collaboration and ineffective communication as a cause of workplace failures. The fact that employees across all levels of organizations feel this strongly about effective employee communication shows that they recognize how important this issue is to productivity and the bottom line. Dynamic collaboration can equal success; poor communication can hamper it.
Distributed companies face added challenges when striving toward effective employee communication. Collaborating with co-workers in the same building is difficult enough; doing so with colleagues spread across the country can easily become a quagmire. More distributed companies are turning to tablet technology to improve communication among employees scattered far and wide. These organizations are discovering the benefits of such a solution—just because a key co-worker is a thousand miles away doesn’t mean collaboration efforts are destined to fail; in fact, these initiatives can thrive.
Here is how distributed companies are using tablets to enhance effective employee communication:
Streamlined Communication
Email. Text. Instant messages. Skype. Snapchat. Voicemail. Social media. Video conferencing. Good, old-fashioned telephone calls and snail mail. Employees at your distributed company may be using all of these methods, and more, to communicate with each other. And the chances are, if they are so many various platforms, something is getting lost or misinterpreted along the way. For example, you may text a co-worker the time for an important conference call, but one small typo (and we all know how auto-correct can mess with texts) causes him to log on to the meeting an hour late. He sends an email back to you, not knowing your primary email address changed. Maybe you get it all sorted out a day later, but at the expense at wasted time and resources.
If your workforce has adapted tablet technology to its operations, effective employee communication can be streamlined through the devices. You don’t necessarily have to choose one method over the others, but whatever platforms you do use can be gathered and standardized your iPad or Surface. Tablets are much easier to type on, as well as to communicate through via video or voice applications. And, if this technology does become indispensible to your employees, they will always have tablets with them during the workday. Strong notification policies and applications will ensure workers receive the communication they should be receiving—“I never got the message” will no longer be an excuse.
Direct Collaboration
Perhaps the greatest contribution tablets are making to effective employee communication is with how workers at distributed companies collaborate with each other. Previously, phone calls often would need to be made, emails exchanged, and channels to be followed simply for an employee to ask a question of someone at corporate. An answer could take days, if the question ever arrived at all.
Tablet-based solutions eliminate much of this red tape—a worker on the front line can send feedback directly to the manager or exec who can best provide a response. Furthermore, employees at multiple locations can work together, either through live chats or direct messages, to solve a problem. Processes that might have taken days to work out across disparate sites can now be achieved in hours or less, and best practices can be developed by the employees themselves.
What has been your distributed company’s biggest obstacle to effective employee communication?
