Statistically, 9 out of 10 people prefer to interact at work in any other way than meetings. It’s a long-known culprit in corporate but also in SMB environments that apply standard operational formulas. Alternatives are hard to come by. You need to buy video conferencing tech, you need to triple-check that attendants are at their desk, that their computer supports the platform etc. Actually, we should have used past tense here as alternatives are no longer hard to come by.
Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
It’s no mystery that enterprises today are racing to give themselves a competitive edge by moving operations from on-premise to cloud. This ‘maturity’ is apparently at its highest in 2015, with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reporting that 44 percent of respondents in a study reported increased revenue, while 36 percent posted a spike in profits.
Perhaps more interestingly (to us, at least), the same survey found that cloud adoption enabled unprecedented levels of scalability and increased collaboration across the surveyed companies – 452 business and IT professionals.
When we designed Hubgets, we wanted not only to facilitate communication, but also to foster collaboration in all-new ways. We’re still ironing out some bugs, but already our newborn baby enables entire teams to send feedback back and forth, collaborate on projects, aggregate searchable data, and keep their peers in the loop even out of office.
In our awareness spree to make Hubgets known far and wide, we came across a TED talk by Margaret Effernan which speaks of the hidden power of contradiction as a crucial aspect of collaboration.
Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash
You won’t believe how many types of meetings exist. You have staff meetings, ad-hoc meetings, board meetings, manager meetings, one-on-one meetings, team-meetings, standing meetings, and the list goes on. Worst of all, meetings are generally perceived as time-wasting. According to business coach Dale Dauten, companies worldwide cumulatively spend a mind-boggling 300K hours per year, purely on congregations.
Most businesses today still use traditional meetings to convene on how to sell a product, proceed with a given project, or adjust their operations. Asking people to step away from their desk to gather in a conference room may have been a sound idea ten years ago, but today this is no longer the case. If there’s two things that never miss from a meeting, it’s communication and data. You can have both in your browser, thanks to Hubgets.
Driving adoption of anything within an organization is difficult enough, because people tend to resist change. Even more so when it comes to all-new collaboration tools. So how do you ensure their buy-in and ongoing support for the tech? Easy. With some good old fashioned education.
It’s crucial not to take deployment lightly. We say this from experience. If you hand the management department a flimsy brochure or a demo video that just scratches the surface of the product, it might do more harm than good. Sometimes higher-ups may be even more resilient in the face of change than the workforce on the ground floor. When it comes to communication & collaboration tools, knowing the numerous benefits of each feature in part lets you align those features perfectly with your business.
Photo by Icons8 team on Unsplash
It starts with an innocent tap on the shoulder — a colleague asks a brief question about an upcoming deadline. No big deal, right? Two conversations and four emails later, you’ve officially wasted almost an hour.
I’m not here to tell you the story of how companies big and small fail to acknowledge the importance of using proper collaboration tools. The cat is out of the bag and has been for years. The market simply isn’t mature enough to take the plunge. What I want to share with you today is the typical scenario where office hours become pure chaos due to simple distractions like the one mentioned above. I’m 100% sure these will strike a chord with fellow office workers far and wide.
We’ve always heard about Bill Gates the geek versus Steve Jobs the visionary, but the reality is both had a bit of the other in them. In fact, Gates had probably more vision than Jobs had a geeky side. Here’s some compelling evidence of that.
After reading Gates’ 1999 book “Business @ the Speed of Thought,” Markus Kirjonen – who is a business student at Aalto University in Finland – did a writeup aggregating the Microsoft founder’s boldest predictions for the future. Not surprisingly (to us, at least) many of them have or are in the process of being fulfilled.
Like desktop computers and smartphones before it, wearable tech now promises to mark a paradigm shift in the way we juggle daily affairs, both personal and at work, and even tackle health-related matters.
People today aren’t flocking to buy smartwatches or tech-infused glasses, but it won’t be long before they do, according to Harris Interactive, a market research firm owned by Nielsen Holdings. The New York-based company polled 9,100 people to determine potential benefits in workplace efficiency, productivity, and safety. They discovered that the number of believers was considerable: 75% of the respondents saw wearables as potentially life-changing in work environments.
Good team work yields positive results in any type of organization, but it’s easier said than done, unfortunately. While technology lets us do pretty much anything these days, we often fail to make proper use of the ingeniously-crafted tools around us.
One such example is team collaboration and the solutions design to assist this process. More often than not they fail to spur productivity when implemented without notice or training, and worse still – before any research has been done about the company’s actual need for these tools. This was the key finding in a study conducted by Softchoice on firms where the managers failed to understand unified communications (UC) and collaboration tools.
The poll was carried out on 250 IT managers and 750 line-of-business employees to determine the impact of typical UC and collaboration rollouts on employee habits, preferences and overall satisfaction at the workplace. One of the first things the survey managed to uncover was that many IT managers are actually hesitant to invest in new collaboration technology because, as they put it, the ones they already have implemented are not being used.