Collaborative Tools: 7 Opportunities to Improve Management

For several years, the trend in enterprise software has been towards collaborative tools. And 2014 saw new players emerge in this market, accelerating companies’ transition to these new tools.

Enterprise social networks, collaborative intranets, instant messaging, collaborative platforms… All these new tools are transforming businesses and management methods.

However, while these new collaborative tools may intimidate managers, they also represent a great opportunity to evolve their management methods and motivate their employees in a more modern way.

Below are seven opportunities brought about by collaborative platforms for managers.

Keeping an Ear on Your Team

Major social networks like Facebook or Twitter have brought about a shift in mindset that is reverberating in the workplace. Your employees feel freer to express themselves, to give their opinions. And they also expect to be heard. Some of your employees may even be influencers on Twitter or LinkedIn and are used to having a say.

Thanks to an enterprise social network, you will be able to give more importance to your employees’ opinions. Don’t hesitate to involve your teams by asking for their opinions on daily decisions or slightly more strategic choices. Collaborative tools, for example, make it very easy to distribute small surveys or questionnaires. It’s an excellent way for you as a manager to gauge your team’s mood, to better understand what motivates them or, conversely, what bothers them.

Develop a Culture of Transparency

A collaborative platform promotes freedom of expression and more public communications. It’s an excellent way for managers to disseminate information more widely and to show that everyone has the same right of access to it. This also allows you to publicly address ideas, objections, criticisms… And to reassure your teams by showing that there are no taboos.

However, be careful to prepare communications on more sensitive topics thoroughly. Communicate your decisions and explain them as clearly as possible. Your employees will be less hesitant to express their disagreement publicly by posting a short message. Take the time to consider your response and craft sentences that leave no room for misinterpretation.

Collaborative Tools to Encourage Agility

With an enterprise social network, you can encourage agility. Encourage your employees to work in small groups. Create cross-functional groups yourself that will work on topics to be tested. Develop an agile culture: lots of exchanges and interactions, multiple iterations on deliverables, collaboration with “clients”… This will allow you to innovate more effectively and quickly visualize whether new projects are viable or not.

Disseminate Information Widely

The ability to easily disseminate content allows you to transmit useful information more quickly and to the right people. With these new collaboration tools, your role as a manager evolves, and the circulation of information becomes an even more important mission.

Make sure to share with your employees any resources that might interest them or help them develop. Encourage your team to share interesting resources they discover. Don’t be afraid of overwhelming your team. People are increasingly accustomed to dealing with a large amount of information, and the search engines present in these participatory platforms are there to facilitate access to information.

Practice Internal Networking

It becomes much easier and faster to connect people with different skills to create value. Practice internal networking. Set up expert groups from different teams or departments. You will then become the coordinator of this collective intelligence, which is a very important source of innovation for the company.

Foster Daily Progress

Collaborative platforms allow you to effectively supplement training and thus help your employees progress daily. Instead of long training sessions from which your employees retain only a tiny part, regularly distribute short and effective materials. For example, you can post a weekly video that explains different sales techniques, adding a small quiz at the end. This mini-training of a few minutes will be easier for the employee to grasp and will leave a greater impact than a large institutional training.

Provide More Regular Recognition

Take advantage of these new interactions created by your enterprise social network to recognize your employees more regularly. Highlight the “salesperson of the week” each week by posting a short interview with them or just a small message that will showcase their results and work. Don’t hesitate to use video for this. A short video is very simple to create and post with a smartphone today, and the impact is significantly greater.

And you, how do you use collaborative tools to manage differently?

The collaborative platform Incenteev supports you in all these daily managerial changes.

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