The constant desire to stay updated with emerging technology, what we call digitization here, has helped organizations overcome the challenges of a rapidly evolving landscape. Certainly, scattered documents, difficulty in finding and sharing files, siloed departments, and lack of automation and document tracking have lowered the overall productivity of the organization.
However, even if you digitize your agency, what still needs to be added?
When implementing a digital solution, two goals should be to create a collaborative environment for employees and ease the complexity of your business processes. Indeed, a collaborative space where your employees can connect with their coworkers, brainstorm, learn new things, and work together can be transformative. Essentially, this is what enterprise collaboration is all about.
Collaboration at the Enterprise Level
Enterprise collaboration refers to how employees working together within the enterprise interact with their co-workers and interface with the workplace itself (systems, processes, documents, etc.). It helps organizations to achieve operational excellence by facilitating a collaborative environment. As a broader concept, it even includes digital technology, such as Laserfiche, that an organization adopts to enable communication, collaboration, and cooperation among employees.
Apart from achieving common goals, enterprise collaboration practices also help you display a strong culture and safeguard intellectual assets.
Examining the Need for an Enterprise Collaboration Platform
Understanding the needs of present-day enterprises is something other than rocket science. The changing workplace dynamics present many challenges, including remote and hybrid work culture, increased employee turnover, complex workflows, and reduced productivity. Organizations must explore the missing link between employee engagement, employee experience, and workplace productivity to stay ahead. This can help them find the best way to leverage modern digital platforms for enhanced efficiency and productivity. For now, let’s understand in detail some of the core challenges enterprises face.
1. Disconnected workplaces
Internal communication, the backbone of business processes, ensures adequate flow of information and knowledge within the organization. However, ineffective or complex communication channels cause misunderstandings and restrict information sharing, ultimately leading to uninformed choices. Furthermore, disconnected employees are less likely to engage, causing barriers to effective teamwork.
2. Scattered documents
Many organizations use physical storage or network drives to store documents. Finding or accessing scattered records often causes information retrieval delays that slow down the process, eventually increasing the overall response time. At the same time, the need for enterprise collaboration makes it challenging for employees to track changes, co-author, securely work on documents, and know which version of a document is the final.
3. Uninformed decision making
A less collaborative environment often discourages employees from contributing to the decision-making process. Employees struggling with data overload, departmental silos, and ineffective communication are unable to collaborate and brainstorm together effectively. Indeed, this limits the diversity of ideas, creativity, resource access, and employees’ ability to contribute innovatively.
4. Lesser employee engagement
The level of employee engagement directly impacts workplace productivity. Uncollaborative workplaces indeed lead to bored, disengaged employees, which in turn leads to lesser productivity and higher turnover rates. Additionally, a lack of a collaborative platform may prevent employees from getting recognized by their organization (because the work isn’t visible) and coworkers, negatively affecting their morale and happiness at work.
5. Unorganized knowledge
An organization’s intellectual assets include not only crucial documents but also the experience of its employees. Siloed organizational structure, lack of a centralized platform, and missing enterprise collaboration practices often compartmentalize knowledge on cluttered network drives within siloed departments and unorganized libraries. So, why not systematically organize it?
