In a survey of over 2,000 members of the TrustRadius community, 15% planned to increase their software spending because of COVID-19. 60% of those businesses planned to purchase collaboration software. Unfortunately, that money may be wasted, as the word “collaboration” is often misunderstood. According to Microsoft, countless businesses confuse collaboration with communication. For example, if you connect with someone over a video call to talk about a project, that is visual communication. If you use a file-sharing service or whiteboard to work on that project at the same time, then you are collaborating.
Video conferencing is a visual communication tool; it is not a true collaboration tool. It allows people to communicate more effectively and allows for improved knowledge and content sharing but is not fully optimised for collaboration. The importance of natural communication cannot be understated. According to UCLA Professor Emeritus of Psychology Albert Mehrabian, 55% of communication is non-verbal, whilst just 7% can be deduced from the spoken word. The one-dimensional nature of video meetings makes it difficult to pick up on non-verbal cues and the nuances of body language and facial expression, thus making it ineffective for clearly articulating complex ideas in an emotive way.
Collaboration is about creating, not just communication – there is a fundamental difference. True collaboration is when people come together to build and critique things in real time. It is much more than just being able to effectively communicate, it needs to be able to support people when they are required to create and build. Whilst video conferencing tools can be helpful for sharing content and improving knowledge, true collaboration requires specialist features that allow you to build, create and critique work effectively.
Empowering Workers to Collaborate: The Ideal Solution
It is not one tool alone that will provide the answer to Hybrid working, but the accumulation of multiple tools in one place, optimised to a company’s own specifications and working styles. Many of the current tools that are available do one or two things extremely well, so it would be wasteful for any solution not to integrate these other solutions, despite their limitations. The ideal solution works to supercharge your already existing assets, facilitating one secure digital workspace where you can bring all your most useful applications together in an environment that is fine tuned for collaboration, blue sky thinking, efficient workflows and much more. The perfect solution needs to optimise digital spaces, to allow you to do more with less space.
A Study from Oxford Economics found that 49% of employees ranked having space to collaborate with co-workers easily and effectively as the most important feature for a productive work environment. Designing spaces that promotes collaboration is essential to ensuring that your team feel content and productive and are adequately equipped to share their ideas without compromising on concision or scale.
The ideal solution gives you the infinite space you need to seamlessly articulate complex concepts and thoughts and allows you to feel unconstrained in your ability to share and develop ideas; driving your businesses shared vision forward. To achieve this, it needs to allow you to draw and write on infinite screen real estate, from all your devices simultaneously. This freedom of expression facilitates a culture of innovation and inspires individuals to capture their best ideas.
Why Laduma?
At Laduma, we believe that the new breed of Hybrid Workforce needs a new breed of Hybrid Workspace. One singular platform where you can bring all your favourite applications and tools with you to do your best work together.
We know that empowering your team and optimizing your assets is the key to doing this – prioritising space, people and process in everything that you do.
Our solution addresses the issue of space by transforming your meeting room walls into 360-degree immersive displays, where you can intuitively drag, drop, and resize content in any configuration you choose. Have everything you need always in view, on a laptop, phone, tablet or wall, helping you to improve your daily processes, maximising situational awareness and people performance.
To find our more about how our digital workspaces could benefit your organization, request a demo.
