How important is collaboration in 2020?
Collaboration is an integral and basic requirement for any team to succeed, so it would be wrong to state that team effort is suddenly more important in 2020 than it was before. Collaboration and supportive environments have always served as key aspects for organisational success, so it remains something that holds as much importance in 2020 as it did before.
So, what has changed?
In spite of the importance of teamwork remaining just as valid and fundamental as always, 2020 has seen massive changes in how a team collaborates. In other words, collaboration is as important as it always was for the success of any project, but the opportunities and mediums available to cooperate and co-work has changed drastically this year, and within a very short time.
What are those changes and what caused them?
Covid-19’s progress throughout the world as an epidemic led to the world going into lockdowns internally and internationally. As a direct and indirect result of those two prime factors, multiple chain reactions were experienced by every sector in existence. Almost every company in the UK had to close their doors, and the very few that remained open, operated with a skeleton workforce.
This series of incidents led to the following changes which can be identified as the main factors that impacted collaboration and teamwork to a great extent:
- Soon, every company that had the opportunity to do so started to adopt work from home business models.
- In the absence of reliable networks, previous experience with the new model and a lack of instant communication with each other, productivity began to suffer.
At that point, even what might have once been the most productive team within a small company would start to work in a disjointed manner, resulting in friction, misunderstandings, and further deterioration of team cohesiveness. All of that contributed to the business falling further behind in a time that is already extremely trying for businesses.
Competent cloud collaboration: the most viable solution
Nobody who has worked in any corporate sector should be unfamiliar with document collaboration systems, but most of the smaller establishments did not know the difference between free cloud-based options that are meant for the general use, and a professional, enterprise-grade, digital document collaboration solution like Kahootz. This cloud-based solution was precisely designed to create a remote working environment where all team members would be able to work on a single document or multiple documents simultaneously and seamlessly. Complete with features such as tracking contributions from each team member and instant feedback on steps taken within the collaborative environment, competent cloud collaboration tools like Kahootz have made the work from home strategy feasible for even smaller organisations.
Not that every small organisation has already adopted competent digital collaboration platforms, of course, but the numbers are increasing. Perhaps the biggest issues are faced by businesses that operated completely offline before. Their unfamiliarity with eCommerce, digital collaborations, etc. is putting them in an unfamiliar scenario, even if the online business model suits their line of work.
