Team Collaboration Shaves Your Day
How You Can Shave an Hour from Your Workday with Team Collaboration in Just Five Minutes
Here’s something to think about the next time you’re listening to music on hold: How much time does inefficient communication drain from your workday? The answer may surprise you.
The average knowledge worker, according to some estimates, spends more than one hour every day simply trying to communicate with people: checking emails, setting up meetings, leaving voicemails, etc.
And that doesn’t take into account the delays that result as you wait for people to check those emails or voicemails and get back to you.
Fortunately, there’s a great way to trim this waste out of your workday, and it doesn’t require that you go on a communications diet. In fact, you can communicate and collaborate all you want—and keep saving time as you do it. The secret is to unify your communications in the cloud. By putting all of your communications and collaboration tools into one application and hosting it in the cloud, you can trim seventy minutes or more from your workday and get more done. Here’s how.
1. Stop checking multiple messaging apps (Save 40 minutes per day)
Studies show that workers spend as much as 40 minutes (or more) each day checking and re-checking different messaging applications including email, voicemail, texts/IMs and other apps. With unified communications (UC) in the cloud, all messages can be corralled into a single app and screen, so you don’t need to open up and check multiple apps, multiple times per day. And with services like voicemail-to-text, you can save even more time by converting your voicemails into email messages.
2. Reach colleagues right away (Save 30 minutes per day)
Find-me/follow-me, call forwarding, single-number service—call it what you will, when calls go directly to the right person rather than their voicemail, it saves a lot of time. (On the other side of that coin, it can take eight hours or more before a person listens to their voicemails.) Factor in presence-based communications tools that let you know when called parties are available, and you can cut down your phone-tag time by half an hour every day.
3. Don’t juggle other people’s calendars (Save time and your sanity)
Arranging a multi-party conference call can feel like herding cats; as soon as one gets in line, another escapes. Cloud-based UC tools simplify real-time collaboration by allowing you to launch a video- or audio conference on the fly, or view colleagues’ status to see when they’re available.
4. Have the answers now—and not when you’re back in the office (Save time, gas and customer relationships)
Knowledge workers need access to critical, and often sensitive, business information from wherever they’re working: at home, at a client site, on the road, etc. Cloud-based communications allow employees to quickly locate and retrieve information in real time from any device—and not just when they’re back in the office at their computer. That means customers can get answers faster, and stay happier longer.
Of course, not all cloud solutions are created equal. You need to consider cost, complexity, security, reliability and compatibility with the tools you use today. And when everything is considered, more companies choose Mitel for their business cloud communications than any other provider in the world.
