Deploying intelligent collaboration platforms for the modern workplace

Many employees who were shifted to working from home have had a baptism of fire in new collaboration technologies. While adopting tools is relatively simple, ensuring that they make an enterprise more productive is an entirely different matter. When it comes to getting the most productivity from fragmented work environments, the organizations seeing the biggest uptick are those using a management-of-change approach to encourage new ways of working.

There are, after all, many choices in the collaboration space, such as Google Meet, Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook and a host of others. But having different groups use ad hoc tools pulls the rug out from under potential productivity gains, so job one is picking a core platform and then, as we’ll discuss, getting the organization to rally around it.

The evolved social collaboration platform

Since its inception in 2006, Facebook has changed the way people collaborate — where they gather to get updates, share ideas, plan events, etc. And, of course, enterprises soon recognized the potential value of using similar platforms for internal communications, webinars and training.

What’s more, enterprises recognized they could surface information to internal and external constituents in a format that is consumable across any device. Documents and artifacts for enterprise consumption could be deployed via social media, negating the need to mail documents or go through an arduous process of updating company web pages, while also making it possible to glean metrics such as engagement.

Despite the gains, however, most employees still “live in” email, struggling with ever-increasing amounts of unrelated information. People have tried to manage the deluge by setting up rules and other collaboration solutions, but they’ve never been effective. And there is no getting around the fact that an individual’s email inbox is just that: individual. So much information is still siloed in millions of inboxes, unable to be mined or analyzed.

Done right, mature and functionally rich collaboration platforms become productivity hubs, replacing email as a more productive way for people to meet and discuss ideas and share information inside and outside of the company. Collaboration platforms present a major paradigm shift in the way work gets done. Providing, that is, you are successful in getting the workforce onboard.

Cultural transformation

To realize the greatest benefits from social collaboration platforms, it’s critical that employees at all levels of the enterprise fully buy into the solution. Over the years, organizations have tried various ways of rolling out new technologies, including releasing the technology and letting users discover it, or letting it spread by word of mouth.

These approaches might work for small companies or for software that isn’t too complex — perhaps even for solutions that require less cognitive investment. But the key to rolling out enterprise collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Slack, Zoom or Workplace from Facebook — and to ensure that they are used to their full potential — is to encourage workers to eschew email and work with colleagues in a much more productive, focused and sharing environment.

These feature-rich platforms enable users to create content, communicate through persistent chat, view video content and interact directly with line-of-business applications, as well as traditional websites and advanced automation. A well-designed implementation intuitively and intelligently focuses the work at hand.

Typical collaboration rollout programs focus on ensuring the platform functions properly — by carrying out testing, network assessments, pilots and the like. The concept of getting employees to buy in through management of change is often sidelined as being an extra, unnecessary expense. “Now that the workforce has proven it can adapt, is a management-of-change program really necessary?”

That reluctance can be costly. Instead, management-of-change or adoption services take business units and employees through a program to ensure they fully realize the benefits of a new collaboration solution. Everyone is encouraged to adopt a cultural transformation in which they employ new working practices that increase productivity.

The expectation is that users will move away from their siloed email solution, toward more productive and shared environments. This approach to deployment ultimately leads to a more intelligent use of the environment and a quicker return on investment.

Employee adoption is critical to ROI

Even if your company has bought into the change and your workforce appears to be happily using the new platform, there is a world of difference between just using a tool and using it intelligently.

Using a paintbrush to hammer in a screw provides an idea of how technology is sometimes used. While many workers will rely on modern productivity applications to only a small degree, getting people to understand how to use a collaboration platform to its fullest will likely require some investment.

Design principles and usage policies should be carefully tuned to the business’s needs and to help avoid user frustration. Seamless integration with critical workflows in the early stages of adoption will help employees develop a positive reaction to the change. In addition, it’s important to understand how workers are adapting to the technology and how they are using the platform to ensure the organization is getting the best return from its investment.

Proactively using data and analytics

As with email, one of the problems with collaboration tools is the abundance of information and how to manage it. The proliferation of messages, files, videos, channels and links will require policies that reduce data sprawl and encourage compliance.

Use of intelligent analytics can help manage the data that collects behind the social interfaces. Truly understanding how an enterprise works can help leaders realize where improvements can and should be made, and where investment is needed.

Community management is an ongoing service that proactively and intelligently monitors the collaboration platforms to provide feedback on a variety of aspects.

Examples include:

• Adoption rates, including hot spots and “not” spots. Where are employees most successfully using the platform? By gathering opinion data, it is possible to implement guidance from successful users and provide mentoring for groups that haven’t yet made the best use of the service.
• Compliance. While data sharing is a central benefit of collaboration platforms, a potential downside is losing track of who is allowed to share what. Data loss prevention capabilities in the collaboration sphere is an important element of protecting a company’s intellectual property.
• Profanity filtering and sentiment trends. Ensuring that workers are using the platforms appropriately, while also gathering feedback on employees' feelings — both positive and negative — toward the company they work for can help organizations better understand their workforce

Greater productivity in the digital world

Enterprises are ready to embrace new ways of working to increase their competitive advantage. The move to digital and mobile, for example, has greatly changed the way companies do business and has enabled many to maintain their presence in a world where lockdowns are still common. Now, to be even more productive in the digital world, organizations must empower their workforce with greater opportunities for collaboration.

Intelligently managing a collaboration platform from concept to run is vital to ensure the best results and maximum return on investment. But employees still need choice in the way they work. The big decision point for enterprise stakeholders is: Do you let employees pick whatever ad hoc tools they believe they need for their job, or does the organization select a flexible yet core platform and set a managed path toward providing the tools for its workforce that guarantee the most productive possible outcome?

About the author

Richard Owen works in DXC Technology’s Modern Workplace offerings division. With a career in IT spanning 30 years, Rich focuses on cloud technologies, social collaboration in the modern enterprise, Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace.