Going Beyond Email: Collaboration Tools That Can Make Work Easier

Collaborative tools can contribute to reducing email traffic by up to 30% and increase efficiency of work teams by 33%, thanks to applications other than email like storing files on the cloud or instant messaging.

Although email continues to be the most essential work tool for many professionals, several alternatives are starting to be introduced to our day-to-day work.

Email has been criticized on several fronts: an excessive number of “unnecessary” emails, access for potential security threats, difficulty in retrieving certain information, or the constant need to keep the inbox “clean” to maintain its effectiveness. It’s important to bear in mind that many employees also choose to communicate through other channels that are utilized by companies. These include Whatsapp, which is used more and more often to discuss business matters, and social network messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Google Hangout and direct messages on Twitter.

In these situations, multiple companies go beyond email (day-to-day it is still essential), and have started to introduce alternative forms of collaboration and communication among their employees.

There are already cloud-based tools capable of integrating information, capturing and sharing knowledge, and delivering it to large numbers of people. They include instant messaging, grouping messages by topics or areas of interest, and allowing restricted access to designated employees for each task. This way, it is possible to organize work teams almost as if they were a newspaper, updating the evolution of a project in the tool. Each step taken, any discussions had, or work submitted will be readily available to consult by members of the team or the project manager.

For companies, security of communications is vitally important, and therefore it is their own responsibility to provide employees with appropriate tools to enable them to work effectively. However, it is also the responsibility of employees to respect the security of professional communications, something that doesn’t tend to happen when having work-related conversations on social networks.

That is why, in all cases, each of these situations that threaten the integrity of email must be approved by the company and adhere to its protocol.