How to Encourage your Team to Work Together?

In today's business world, collaboration has become a pretty big buzzword. Every company hopes that cloud technologies and content sharing platforms will enable its staff to efficiently work together, wherever they are. However, if leaders are not truly committed to creating a culture of collaboration, then their employees will never reap the full benefits of these tools.

Kevin Lynch, CEO of cloud content collaboration service Volerro:

“A collaborative culture should be something that employees feel, rather than something that the executive team talks about, [When this happens], it inspires a sense of community within an organization, while driving productivity, insight and innovation."

If you want to make cloud collaboration technologies truly work for your business, you need to show your team how to work well together. 

Here are six simple ways to encourage a cooperative workplace:

1. Set Team Goals: Use plans and structured content that clearly defines present and future goals for the team. With this, all team members can share a distinct point of view.

2. Build cohesion: Build a means of communicating that establishes a distinct set of priorities, allows for easy work flow and makes all colleagues feel included. If you keep everyone on the same play book, it enables team members to focus and flourish.

3. Develop a creative environment: This allows team members to brainstorm in an open and judgmental framework that embraces the team's diversity.

4. Break Down Barriers: Use of multiple channels of communication such as email, text messaging and phone can ultimately create barriers to successful collaboration. It is good to use just one channel that allows the team to communicate efficiently and effectively.

5. Visualize ideas: This provides team members the opportunity to use visuals to clarify and share their ideas at the simplest level. Visualize ideas with anything from rough sketches to full-scale presentations.

6. Execute: With all focus on idea creation, remember the most important step: acting on the good ones. A failure to implement existing proposals will kill the employee's desire to create new ideas.

These six Points are very helpful to encourage team to work together. If you want to lean more about team collaboration then you must read this Article in this article you know about the software used in Small and Big size Organization for Make Collaboration and Communication between employees better to make a great team : http://www.alturacs.com/blog/business-collaboration-tools-midsize-small-businesses/ 

5 Steps to Cross Organizational Collaboration and Teamwork

Teamwork and collaboration make an important contribution to the success of business initiatives.  To create effective teamwork, you need to break down any departmental barriers to collaboration so that you can draw on the best people. Set clear objectives and define working relationships so that members can work as a cohesive team.

Here are the five Steps to cross organizational collaboration and Teamwork:

Overcome barriers: One among the major barriers to effective collaboration is the conflicting needs and priorities of the team and the individual departments in your company. All department managers have their own targets to meet and may be reluctant to release key staff for external projects. So, you need to convince departmental heads of the importance and benefits of the team project and persuade them to cooperate.

Agree Direction: Project teams need a clear sense of direction to turn members into a team. You can encourage shared ownership by asking team members to agree the key objectives and define the benefits to the organization.

Recruit Members: Cross-functional teams bring together people with the skills and experience to deal with all aspects of a project. Ask your human resources department to maintain an up-to-date skills profile to find the right people. The profile should include personal skills, important achievements, work experience and involvement in other team projects.

Clarify Responsibilities: A balanced team includes all the skills your team needs to complete its work at different stages of the project. For example, projects like new product development will require different contributions at each stage.  So, it is important for each member to understand their role and responsibility at each stage.

Support Collaboration: Your team will work more effectively if it has the tools to support easy collaboration, like email and instant messaging simplifies communication between members and makes it easy to share documents, project updates and other essential information. Also, accessing information from a single source helps to eliminate the risk of duplication or working on out-of-date information.

Why you need to adopt Collaboration Services on the cloud?

Now a days, more and more businesses are keen to engage and collaborate with stakeholders within and beyond the walls of their enterprise. Whether it is the customer, partners, coworkers, or suppliers, businesses are keen to collaborate with them in real time. And to facilitate the seamless flow of information and knowledge-sharing between stakeholders, today businesses make use of services called collaboration services.

For scalable and reliable delivery of the applications, it is important to adopt cloud computing.  Here we have listed five compelling reasons that makes you to change your mind about moving your collaboration workload to a cloud platform.

Flexibility and Reliability: Today, collaboration happens across geographical boundaries and time zones. And, cloud-based collaboration solutions are not restricted to a specific geography and can reach the employees of an organization dispersed across regions.

Grow and shrink your operation freely and instantly: Reducing complexity and adaptation to changing business environment are some of the major challenges that IT industry faces today. But if organizations adopt cloud-based collaboration services, they get access to elevated elasticity in resource allocation that allows them to grow and shrink their operations freely and instantly, without carrying the burden of provisioning or de-provisioning expensive resources. 

Latest functionality of the continually upgraded versions of the apps: Cloud-based collaboration services always ensure that the latest security patches and application upgrades are applied to the cloud delivery platform to ensure that the consumers get secure access to the new functionality quickly. The entire configuration or migration process is performed by the back end teams, thus, relieving you of the effort to manage downtime.

Reduced Operational Costs: Cloud-based collaboration services allow organizations to start deployment immediately. With this, they able to save the cost of buying new servers and are also get benefited from the reduced need for space, liability and power. Many of the cloud-based services run on a 'Pay-per-use' subscription model which allows companies to budget for them easily and more accurately. 

Reduced Risks: If you use an open platform and open clients for application access, shifting from one vendor to another is an easy task. If you plan your deployment well, then you will be able to shift with minimal or no change at the end point.

The above mentioned are just five ways in which businesses benefit from adopting cloud-based collaboration technology. But, if you dig a little deeper, you will find many more such compelling reasons to adopt this platform.One of them is listed here Just check this out to know more : http://www.alturacs.com/solutions/midmarket-collaboration-ip-office/