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Lately, everybody speaks about how you can increase productivity with better collaboration. Let’s think about how we are used to work together: in-person meetings, one-on-one discussions, phone calls that never end etc. Remember those days when, if you stepped away from your desk phone for just a few minutes, you had every chance to miss a business opportunity, or play phone tag for the remainder of the day?! Well, not anymore.

Thanks to the advent of Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) tools, these issues are story of the past. However, there are still many organizations out there doing business the traditional way. According to the Chaos Theory report:

• Lack of communication leads to inefficient collaboration, which poses a major challenge for more than one-third of project managers.
• Two-thirds of project managers can access sensitive data in their organization, but only half can see who has read relevant information or downloaded a shared document. The study don’t even consider how much time is wasted on finding that relevant information time and again.
• Only half of respondents say their organization’s IT department supports employees’ use of new technologies.

The impact of the aforementioned pain points is immediately clear.

Now there’s dedicated collaboration software

Endorsed by the U.K. Chapter of the Project Management Institute , the report warns that inefficient collaboration costs organizations 20 working days per year, which can end up jeopardizing a company’s bottom line, as deadlines are missed. So what would facilitate more efficient collaboration? Today, this issue – like many other problems in every industry – is addressed through technology.

Specialized collaboration software saves hours per week and slashes the maintenance costs associated with an antiqued communication infrastructure. If your organization has dispersed teams working across different geographies and time zones, this technology isn’t just helpful, it’s mandatory. Solutions like Hubgets and VoipNow can help them stay connected at all times with features including enterprise telephony, presence, instant messaging, and conferencing.

These tools enable your staff to collaborate wherever and whenever, sharing important information and files throughout the day. This annihilates some of productivity’s biggest enemies and puts the spotlight back on what truly matters: working your magic while increasing revenue and boosting profits, of course 😉

How about some ‘efficient’ collaboration for a change

Say one of your London employees is stuck in a meeting and will not be able to leave the boardroom until the end of the day. His colleague, who is in the United States, urgently needs to discuss a pressing project. Here’s where the presence feature comes in and saves the day. The U.S. guy uses it to check his team mate’s availability. When it’s clear that they won’t be able to discuss over the phone, so he instantly selects the instant messaging feature and puts the project back on the right track in minutes. Easy as pie! Of course, this is just one of dozens of real-life scenarios where collaboration software works its magic.

So, inefficient collaboration isn’t just a nuisance, it’s detrimental to the bottom line because it’s chaotic in nature. Businesses big and small have everything to gain by addressing this issue. And unlike a decade ago, technology can be trusted with the solution to the problem day in and day out.