Collaboration and Productivity Software 2020: Complete Guide

Collaboration and Productivity Software breaks the organizational silos letting top management and teams interact informally and pass along pertinent information, rather than stay stuck in an endless cycle of emails. It resolves common stressors and opens lines of communication, leading to the organization becoming a more transparent and evolved workplace.

With a single platform to share information and organize conversations, teams can be encouraged to stay on the job with greater focus and efficiency. A rough estimate suggests that 80% of businesses today are employing Collaboration and Productivity Software to streamline their business operations and increase productivity by up to 51%.

Productivity tools or lack thereof figure prominently in many Employee Satisfaction or Voice of Workforce surveys. Collaboration and Productivity Software enables quicker onboarding of new members to projects and teams. This reduces employee stress and reduces miscommunication and rework. Additionally, a Gallup Poll observes that a communicative workplace can reduce turnover by 59 percent.

With modern workplaces spread across geographies and timelines; many organizations are choosing to work with multiple consultants, part-timers, subject experts, and freelancers. Businesses, therefore, need to offer efficient work collaboration capabilities to be able to connect with the best remote workers. The use of efficient Collaboration and Productivity Software can help ensure that.

Everyone from governments to creative fields like media and advertising, engineering, technology companies, manufacturing, real estate, and retailers can use Collaboration and Productivity Software. The software has a wide appeal across industries and finds users in any organization that needs collaboration and communication among its staff for everyday business-oriented tasks.

Collaboration and Productivity Software is useful for companies and teams of all sizes involved in marketing, sales, creative, accounts, administration, and customer-facing roles. Most importantly, companies can onboard and organize all their remote staff who may be spread across different time zones and work smoothly in tandem with consultants, freelancers, and experts who may be collaborating with the company on different projects. 

Through cloud document management, Collaboration and Productivity tools help employees access their documents from anywhere, anytime. Users can create or edit documents and share them with their teams for feedback or approval in real-time.

Automation of repetitive activities helps free up tremendous chunks of time for team members. Tasks such as scheduling, tagging files, creation of checklists, and email responses can often be managed using automation tools.

Collaboration and Productivity Software provides automated workflows that help organizations monitor progress on tasks and keep team members on the same page. 

AI is a combination of related technologies, such as Machine Learning, Data Science, Predictive Analytics, etc., that imitates human thinking and actions. Typically, it does so by learning from its experiences, which are provided in the form of data. Similar to the human brain, the complexity of the world of AI makes it perplexing to figure out which technology from among natural language processing, machine learning, or just plain old automation is the right fit for the needs of an organization or process. 

A voice-enabled smart assistant can save time by scheduling meetings and taking notes in real-time. AI assistants can reschedule and send important notifications automatically. AI can also suggest documents and resources that a person may need, and make them available during a presentation or a conference.

Artificial Intelligence combined with Natural Language Processing works together to improve video collaborations in several ways. In meetings, it can provide automatic transcription or translation, which can facilitate the efficient collaboration of people from all over the world. By automatically detecting echo and minimizing the background noise, AI can also improve the audio quality of these meetings.

Downtime in a company’s lifecycle can generate huge costs and also impact the entire organization’s productivity. It is essential that Collaboration and Productivity Software have built-in redundancy and a solid comprehensive backup and recovery plan that can shorten downtime and get systems up and working easily.

The productivity tools are largely used by employees and hence ease of use and adoption is critical for success. The tools should be simple, intuitive with a great user interface, easy to use, and should require very minimal training. Teams must be able to navigate and use their various tools and features, without having to go through extensive training.

Productivity tools include many dimensions and there are several specialized tools that cater to the individual aspects very well - like meeting management, project management, webinar tools, task management to name a few. There are products that bundle all related features as a suite. The suite approach might work very well if companies need to address all related aspects. A prudent buy can save valuable employee time, which they may spend switching between complementary business apps to get their work done.

Many of the monitoring and productivity tools involve screen capture, and collecting employees’ private information. The tools should support end-to-end encryption to transfer and store data. Also, the data should not be collected during an employee’s break time. Collaboration and Productivity Software should offer controls where information and interactions among team members can be shared or withheld with ease, as may be required. The tools should provide complete control over who sees what data in the reports. Role-based access and configurable reports are some of the required key features.

When companies do not map out their specific needs and goals, they end up making short-sighted purchase decisions in adopting software that may have too many tools several of which are not needed by the organization.

Companies potentially face resistance to adoption from employees for reasons of privacy, security, misuse of data. This is especially true for employee monitoring tools and some productivity tools. Some of the tools can also cause morale issues for the employees. Companies can solve such issues by including employee representatives in the buying decisions and adoption process.