Pramod Sharda, CEO, IceWarp, India and Middle East how SME’s can overcome the collaborative challenges to improve productivity and overall business
The move to hybrid workspaces is here to stay. Offering the best of both worlds, the hybrid office is undoubtedly the workplace of the future. The new flexible approach empowers everyone within the ecosystem to perfectly balance the benefits of working from home or someplace pretty along with that of in-office days. That being said, creating a hybrid work culture can prove to be quite a challenge for many small and medium enterprises. When the pandemic first began, the bigger organizations were better equipped with more advanced technology (or the resources to procure it) to embrace the option of working virtually.
On the other hand, SMEs didn’t have the requisite digital tools or immersive technology to effectively support their remote, distributed, or hybrid team’s collaboration. For an initial period, due to the suddenness of the crises, most SMEs lacked either technology, personnel, or internal communications platforms to provide their workforce with a dedicated communications network. Unaware of the latest incredible online collaboration tools, many of them were compelled to believe that they didn’t have the time, money, or skills to make a smooth and effective digital transition.
SMEs have had to adapt nearly every aspect of how their business operates and how they work with customers in the past two years, and most of this has been with minimal access to critical tools and technologies. One cost-effective and straightforward solution to overcoming collaborative challenges is finding your enterprise a set of online collaboration tools, or better yet, a suite of relevant tools to make it much easier for your team to work remotely.
These tools simplify operations and communications exponentially as everything is stored in the cloud, so your team can access documents, join meetings, or discuss projects from anywhere. Readily giving your employees the option to work remotely and prioritizing their safety during this period is one of the best ways to nurture happier, more productive employees in these turbulent times.
According to studies, a large majority of business professionals depend on technology to collaborate. So, it might be time-saving, sensible, and highly productive to enable them with a common (set of) easy to use online business collaboration tool(s) that can help businesses thrive despite the physical distances between teams.
Smaller business entities might have difficulty adapting to remote functioning as it might be challenging for them in terms of technology, collaborative solutions, and people’s skills. They can benefit from using online collaboration solution suites that cater to several communication challenges within the same platform. Employees do not have to learn to juggle from one application to another to get basic tasks and teamwork done.
For instance, IceWarp’s online collaborative business tools ecosystem provides multiple features and functionalities within the same platform. Within OaaS, options include Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and recently Cloud Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), on a freemium, pay-as-you-go, or a retainer basis. With an affordable solution like this that can be seamlessly integrated with their processes, enterprises also have the satisfaction that they are only paying for the services they are actually using while enjoying the many benefits of cloud computing. Apart from increased productivity and cost reductions, they are also able to regularly monitor workflow using a digital platform.
Online collaborative tools are a huge productivity enabler for organizations of all sizes. Storing documents in the cloud, whether it’s for word processing, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations or sharing contacts and being able to work on the same thing in real-time, is a massive productivity boon. These advanced yet simplified business collaboration tools ensure that your team will never have to worry about working on outdated versions of a document or, worse, losing something in the event of a PC crash. Keeping everything on the cloud means all that data is offsite, which can be crucial if there’s an outage or a disaster.
These tools can be absolute game-changers, but despite the numerous reasons for a business to embrace the cloud, SMEs must realize that technology, by itself, cannot foster productivity gains and cost savings. They first need to understand and assess their business by mapping their people and processes and recommending the best-fitting technology measures to bridge this gap.
