Workplace Analytics Can Cut Through the Noise in Collaboration Tools

Collaboration tools make remote work happen, but multiple tools with overlapping features can add to inefficiencies and lead to shadow IT challenges. Ben Waber, President and Co-founder of Humanyze says workplace analytics can help understand whether collaboration solutions facilitate ‘collaboration’  in the right way. 

There are a staggering number of collaboration tools that organizations can use, ranging from chat functions to collaboration platforms. While this means that the right set of tools exists to meet the needs of any company, it is also likely that finding the right one will get lost in the noise of a thousand other choices. Sifting through this noise requires understanding what the goals of implementing a new technology are and how they will impact the organization’s health. In order to understand this, we can leverage workplace analytics technologies to help guide us through the process while ensuring the improvement of your organizational health.

Increasing Productivity

Workplace analytics can help organizations determine what collaboration patterns exist today and how they should change moving forward. For example, when a company is trying to impact near-term productivity, they need to maximize output in the near term and perhaps be less concerned with innovation and the employee experience. In many cases, this means increased efforts to tighten collaboration within teams. Collaboration tools that mirror this internal focus tend to be specialized tools that are extensively tailored to the needs of a profession or team. 

Tools like Salesforce chat for salespeople or JIRA for developers are ones that facilitate communication within a particular set of teams. It’s unlikely that an engineer would find much use for Salesforce in their day-to- day work, however, if a company is looking for a tool that facilitates communication and improves workflows within a sales team they would choose Salesforce as their preferred collaboration tool.

In other cases, near-term productivity requires tight coordination across teams. When a company is seeking to facilitate collaboration across multiple divisions in order to prepare for the simultaneous rollout and production of a car, we might need a different tool. If marketing needs to set consumer expectations for when it will be available, and operations need to know the amount of capital it can invest in production capacity, the two departments need a different tool for cross-collaboration. 

The tool needs to allow for rapid communication across groups while keeping certain processes in mind. In this scenario, a general-purpose tool is more desirable, such as Slack and email. The ability to message anyone and organize communication into threads or channels and quickly get to an answer makes this preferable to more siloed tools. 

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Impacting Employee Engagement

As organizations shift to prioritizing employee engagement, building strong relationships takes precedence over near-term efficiencies. It’s here that richer communication channels, such as video tools and scheduled meetings, are more effective. Research shows that short of face-to-face communication, conversations with video can engender higher levels of trust than text-based communication. As long as these conversations don’t need to be referenced or shared widely, these tools are an excellent choice to help build an organization’s social capital.

These strong ties sometimes need to make way for more flexible collaboration patterns. When teams are changing rapidly or employees need to be exposed to new networks, adaptability comes to the fore. Here tools such as Slack, combined with specialized plugins intentionally create shifting relationships by randomly connecting people in different parts of the organization. 

Augmenting those introductions with Zoom or other video chat technologies helps cement those relationships in the short term for quick information sharing. Creating diverse networks makes it more likely that people can activate them when necessary and leave some connections dormant when they’re not as useful. Some of these tools require more adaptation of workstyles than others, so as always appropriate training and behavior modeling by leadership is necessary for success.

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The Case for Workplace Analytics

While some of these scenarios seem to have relatively obvious answers, there are more complicated instances within companies that require a thorough understanding of how work is getting done today in order to achieve improvements to collaboration. By leveraging a workplace analytics tool companies get a full view of how flows and processes allow for collaborations within and between teams. 

By understanding how collaboration is taking place, companies can make more informed decisions about the right collaboration tools for their employees. However, the work doesn’t stop there. It is important that companies continue to measure for any change and evaluate whether new tools are facilitating collaboration in the way they were intended to. If they are not, workplace analytics can help leadership implement new initiatives to help course-correct.

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