10 Startling Statistics On How Businesses Collaborate

G BCSocial www.bcsocial.com 10 STARTLING STATISTICS ABOUT HOW BUSINESSES COLLABORATE. We asked 133 senior managers in mid-sized US and UK businesses about the most pressing collaboration issues their business. We gave them 10 pre-selected categories and asked them if this was an issue in their business. These are the results 1. Is it very slow to get other departments to contribute to proposals and projects despite them having relevant information? 67% Conclusion Information remains siloed in departments. Very often it is not unwillingness to share that is the issue but the impracticability of responding in time and the lack of any way to find a record of previous responses to similar requests. Find ways to make sharing and retaining % of businesses with this issue. information easier. 2. Do you spend more than 10 hours per week in email sifting, reading, forwarding and searching for old emails? 63% Conclusion Inefficient use of email is reckoned to waste one day per week for every knowledge worker. Yet many businesses remain wedded to it for all sorts of inappropriate uses. Investigate ways of sharing information that is easier to search file and share and built for this purpose. 3. Would you say file searching and retrieval from file servers, emails, SharePoint and intranets is an issue in your organisation? 51% Conclusion When people's natural social instincts clash with an organisation's need to file and archive this issue is very common. Best to look for solution that more naturally fit with the human need to share with the collective need to organise and retrieve. Coupling email to a file serve delivers this. arely 4. Would you say you spend less than 20% of a project actually thinking about the issues, with the rest of the time taken up by administration, management and clunky search? 42% Conclusion When projects become more about the mechanics of delivery it squeezes out the time and oxygen available to actually think about how best to deliver something. This is an innovation killer with the same practices repeated with no time to think about how to improve them for efficiency and profitability. Change how time is allocated on projects. 5. Do you have to dip into endless systems to find documents, conversations, comments, approvals and disapprovals that you need all of a sudden? 51% Conclusion Emails, IM, file servers, intranets etc do not task very well. The classic one-line approval in email, especially from a customer, can be problematic when disputes arise. Sign-off needs to be clear unambiguous and auditable or trouble is being stored up. 6. Is the output of creative sessions often lost, with no think gRoup of people way of easily locating the creative threads that led to topetheR key decisions? BRAINSTORM Conclusion The intellectual property of creative and knowledge businesses is usually the output of creative sessions that are very costly to hold. But often the outcome is a photo of 47% a whiteboard and some scribbled notes. A collaboration platform should allow the discussion to continue and the output to be stored against the conversation. 7. Do colleagues and team members often complain of time being wasted, inefficient processes and being 'swamped'? 72% Conclusion This feeling of information and task overload can become overwhelming with consequent impacts on work quality and employee morale. As budgets for staff are only getting tighter investing in tools to make their time more productive must be a business priority. 8. sss Is the software you use for project management too complex and reliant on having project specialists to make significant progress? 36% Conclusion When digging in to the data those respondents with project management in their title reported a much higher response to this (62%). So ironically the tools dedicated to making projects run smoother often have the opposite effect. Most of us are not PM specialists and struggle to use dedicated tools. Does your organisation find it hard to get contractors up to speed and contributing to projects, often breaking security policies to allow them access to the necessary information? 22% Conclusion The line between internal and external staff is getting more blurred all the time. Especially in creative industries the ability to have contractors and freelancers on a shared system is key to speeding up contribution and completing projects fast. Pulling customers in too is a huge help in getting feedback and approvals more quickly. Systems that allow this should be investigated. 10. Do you find it difficult to respond to client requests quickly enough, because the knowledge is often scattered, in people's heads or hard to ask of the right people quickly? +ime Conclusion 42% It's a real frustration for businesses to know the answer is in the business somewhere but they need to send 50 emails to find the information. Far better to share, capture and have ready access to the people, documents and conversations that will get an answer to your client in less time and for less cost. G BCSocial Take a 30 day no obligation trial today. www.bcsocial.com