The Project Management Tool to Fix Broken Collaboration

These are surreal times; everyone is trying to rapidly adapt to the new normal of COVID-19. We are coming to terms with the new reality of workplace needs, as organizations scramble to identify tools to increase front-line worker efficiency. Any such tools should not only mitigate legal and security risks but also entail minimum friction in adoption. The new product and software should provide a clear line of sight to tasks/work and yet not overwhelm users with complexities. Employees are spending 50% more time than they did previously in collaborative work; as a result, the routine tasks of updating team members through meetings, calls and emails can now take up to 80% of an employee’s overall available time.1 In a separate study done by McKinsey (Figure 1), similar trends are showcased where employees spend a large amount of their time on mundane tasks as highlighted under the first column; “Interaction workers’ Tasks.” However, with the right tools and technologies, productivity can be improved greatly as shown by the value-added time and total productivity improvements in the chart below.

Figure 1: Productivity improvement with effective collaboration tools

As companies become “remote first”, the importance of a work collaboration platform which satisfies the minimum criteria outlined above is increasingly pertinent today. With a plethora of competing platforms within departments and across organizations, simple communication and sharing of information can prove challenging. Even in a pre-COVID-19 scenario, 15% of an employee’s work time is wasted on ineffective communication costing companies an average of $11,000 per employee per annum. Large businesses with 500 employees could be losing well over $5 million annually due to such poor communication and collaboration.3 Collaborating effectively not only has cost benefits but also helps in other ways. Companies that do communicate effectively are 4.5 times more likely to retain the best employees.4 By creating a collaborative workplace, employees are more likely to want to work there, decreasing turnover. Additionally, effective collaboration is a key skill that can dictate an employee’s effectiveness and success within the organization.5 Companies that utilize the right online collaboration tools and digital workplaces can reap up to a 30% increase in productivity.6 However, having the right tools is critical. Innovation departments and think-tank groups within enterprises are prioritizing tools that are easily adaptable and, require minimum change management while improving collaboration ability and overall productivity. According to a study done by Deloitte, collaboration platforms and other channels of communication will be essential in years to come (Figure 2). While seemingly simple to conceptualize, however, the process from selection to execution is far more challenging, further complicated by the fact that different departments within the same firm have different needs and protocols. There is need for a collaboration tool that can be uniformly rolled out across an organization with minimal onboarding friction and is versatile enough to be used across its various departments. 

Figure 2: Expected use of communication channels in the next three to five years

TRIYO is an all-around solution that offers a strong line of sight to task statuses, progress and contextual commentary. It can easily adapt to the working styles of different individuals and the existing productivity tool-kits of different departments. TRIYO is one of the few solutions that sits atop existing tools and infrastructure, providing users a singular productivity platform:

• On-boarding is simple and can be simultaneously rolled out across the organization with little downtime, while meeting required security protocols
• Communication is easy, with contextual and general comments captured with transparency
• Tasks are clearly defined and assigned
• Version controls are automated
• Workflows are flexibly defined by users
• Every update is time stamped for retrieval
• An analytical dashboard and other features provide the metrics for a variety of informative business decisions and audit trails.

 

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Sources:

¹Collaboration Overload: Harvard Business Review
²Figure 1: The hyper-connected workplace: Will productivity reign?
³Businesses Lose an Average of $11,000 per Employee Every Year Due to Ineffective Communications and Collaboration: Webtorials Survey for Mitel Networks
⁴21 Collaboration Statistics that Show the Power of Teamwork: RoomToEscape
⁵What Are Organizations Doing in 2020 to Prepare for the Future of Work? [A Global Perspective]: Emergenetics
⁶Digital collaboration for a connected manufacturing workforce: McKinsey
⁷Figure 2: The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies