Sometimes I forget the power of teamwork.
As a small business owner and a media producer, I often am flush with ideas and heavy with work. With the need to get things done in a hurry, sometimes I will develop a solution or put together a product without really consulting other experts or colleagues. Everything seems fine until I roll out the results of my efforts and discover that I’ve failed to consider something essential, or my creative idea was not so creative after all.
Usually this moment of discovery comes when I vet the work to others.
Bringing others in on the creative process is essential, whether media work or business strategy. The value of collaboration can be overlooked, just like exercise—the absence of collaboration can really show.
Thankfully, there are many ways to collaborate in 2014 even though we’re increasingly becoming islands of productivity in this mobile world of ours. There are calls, texts, chat, bulletin board systems, wikis and a multitude of hybrid offerings. Communicating and collaborating have never been easier.
At the same time, though, these collaboration tools often miss the boat and inhibit collaboration.
That’s because many of the collaboration options out there are too complex. While they can deliver “the goods”, in practice they often become the focus of the interaction and not the idea exchange itself. This slows collaboration and can discourage team members from reaching out to collaborate; when you’re under a deadline, you need frictionless collaboration, like what used to exist when everyone was in the same office, and it was as simple as popping into a colleague’s office.
Not only are many of the collaboration tools too complex, they’re also not reliable enough. If a solution doesn’t work all the time, why use it?
The hallmarks of a good collaboration tool are reliability, cost effectiveness—and ease of use. All of these characteristics must exist in a conference call solution.
Conference calling is one of the easiest ways to communicate and the technology has gotten cheaper while maintaining the reliability that has made conference calling a staple of business.
Take AT Conference, for example, one of the leading conference call solutions. It comes with call recording, usage reporting, and a roll call feature that plays a list of everyone on the call through the touch of a button. Within minutes anyone with a phone is collaborating with team members, customers or prospective clients.
Businesses need to not only support collaboration, but also choose smart ways to collaborate. Conference calling delivers a low-cost, reliable and easy to use way to ensure the team is reading out of the same playbook.
Edited by Maurice Nagle