Unified Communications Featured Article

Why Social Collaboration has Become More Important than Ever

By Miguel Leiva-Gomez
TMCnet Contributor

It's happening everywhere. Businesses are going global and beginning to feel the strain of having to manage employees across oceans and continents. These employees their employer will probably never see are starting to have a place in companies whose doors they will probably never walk through. Welcome to the era of remote employment!

In order for enterprises to deal with situations in which they have employees dispersed across large distances, they need to adopt technologies that will allow them to establish relationships easily and conveniently across international borders. This means implementing some sort of social collaboration tool and using it correctly.

Larger companies have issues with adapting to new and changing environments, and tech companies are no exception. In fact, I know of a few that can use a little sprucing up in their own technology infrastructure despite the fact that they themselves are selling the very products that they need to do this. This is often because a CIO may be afraid to loosen his/her sleeves and do something radical that may present a few risks, however minor they may be. For some, it's just enough for things to “work”, regardless of how rigged up and improvised the system looks. This leads to frustration for new hires and massive losses in productivity even with the most experienced veterans.

A true social collaboration platform allows for training and internal communication to happen fluidly and harmoniously. Perhaps the only way to do this is to adopt an array of tools where the technology moves out of the way to put the collaboration into focus. Finding such tools involves tons of trial and error, but in the end, you will unveil a system that will not work against your company's productivity.

In a world where time is money, you just can't afford to be using outdated and badly-designed “enterprise” collaboration tools. Putting in the time to choose the best conferencing option for your company is time well served.