Businesses are leveraging new generation software such as teleconferencing tools to enhance communication in their teams. Learn how you can leverage conferencing tools to improve collaboration for success.

Organizations with connected employees experience a 25% increase in productivity. Business success is dependent on effective communication, and organizations need to have the right set of tools to support communication and collaboration efforts.

For businesses looking to encourage collaboration in their teams, teleconferencing tools provide an easy means of communication. Thanks to advancements in technology, organizations can use a wide range of conferencing tools to boost collaboration and productivity.

Here are some ways audio conferencing tools can be great collaborative solutions.

1. Breaking Down Silos

In organizations where silos exist, employees distrust other departments and colleagues, resulting in the hoarding of information. This hinders collaboration.

The silo culture spews out of poor communication structures, and gradually, employees start being protective of their resources and unwilling to share knowledge with other teams.

Some of the signs of silo culture in an organization include managers being unaware of new initiatives or progress made on projects, duplication of efforts, power struggles, and harmful consensus.

Do silos hurt the productivity of an organization? The simple answer is yes. The silo mentality will harm productivity as teams cannot work effectively without relevant information and knowledge.

Where there is a silo mentality, innovation and creativity are suppressed because the opportunity for the cross-pollination of ideas is not shared. Resources also become scarce or inaccessible, resulting in the workforce spending too much time looking for information.

In other cases, the business ends up incurring unnecessary overheads by making duplicate orders for resources that already exist.

Silos will not only create inconsistencies with customers but can also affect cohesion, morale, collaboration, and engagement among employees.

You can prevent silos from spewing and break them down by building open lines of communication. There is no collaboration where silos exist. Leverage audio conferencing tools to bring the workforce, departments, and the management on the same page.

They can make information transfer and sharing a lot simpler than email communication. Through conferencing, departments can create bonds and align on different projects.

You can sustain recurring weekly meetings through conferencing tools as they allow the teams to join any time from where they are. Regular meetings can also help build trust and transparency, thus boosting collaboration.

Conferencing tools allow employees to share information and resources regularly and, more effectively, make collaboration seamless.

2. Preservation Of Knowledge

Inadequate information and knowledge sharing due to distance and time constraints are barriers to collaboration. When your team has geographical and structural separations, it may be challenging to collaborate effectively.

For instance, getting them together for a meeting can be taxing when the teams are in different countries or regions. On the other hand, structural separation existing where teams work on different projects may cause a divide in prioritization.

Infrequent contact is a product of geographical and structural separation and can negatively impact collaboration. Conferencing tools come in handy in addressing separation barriers of collaboration. They promote quick, convenient, and frequent contact across teams regardless of their location and projects.

The tools have call recording features that allow organizations to record knowledge transfer sessions, events, and meetings. Team members who were unavailable for the sessions for different reasons may playback the calls and catch up with their available colleagues.

Conferencing tools through auto-recording help organizations preserve the knowledge that the teams can review and reference for collaborative initiatives.

3. Improve Attendance

Virtual events invite more people to participate compared to in-person events. Note that collaboration begins with engagement and participation. Unfortunately, due to time and distance constraints, many organizations have not been able to enjoy as much engagement and participation as they would love to.

Collaboration requires engagement, participation, and communication. Participation creates an environment that supports knowledge transfer, information sharing, understanding, and engagement among stakeholders. All these are ingredients of effective communication.

While that is the case, poor engagement and lack of interaction are communication barriers. In the past, teams have been unable to attend meetings and brainstorming sessions due to issues such as time constraints. Some businesses also opted to have only a representative attending meetings to cut travel costs.

Conferencing tools have eliminated the barriers and mitigated the distance and cost-related challenges to meeting attendance. Equipping employees with conferencing tools boosts attendance in meetings allowing them to participate effectively, get information, and access the resources they require for collaboration.

Employees are more likely to attend meetings they find convenient and efficient on resources such as time and money. While it is not possible to get every employee to participate in a physical meeting in a room, conferencing is flexible and scalable and can accommodate many participants at a go.

Employees who are unable to attend a meeting at the time can also playback the meeting recording and share their input in the meeting chat even after it has ended. This can significantly boost participation and collaboration.

4. Streamlining collaboration

While emails have been used for decades for communication in organizations, they may not be the best tool for collaboration. With so many employees complaining about overloaded email inboxes, loss of productive time, and frustration, companies are looking for tools that allow them to communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Communication software such as conferencing tools helps employees communicate better with their colleagues and managers by eliminating the challenges of email communication.

Information is shared faster without a lot of back and forth, and teams can hold conversations on demand and make conclusions and decisions on the go.

Teleconferencing Tools for Increased Collaboration

With the right teleconferencing tools, organizations can experience a considerable improvement in collaboration and productivity. The technologies come with features that combine to eliminate common barriers to collaboration, such as silo mentality, lack of participation and engagement, and limited access to information and knowledge.

ConferenceTown.com teleconferencing software has all the features you need for effective communication and collaboration. We are talking about quality call quality, free call recording, instant and unlimited conferences, and organized discussions powered by reaction buttons, to mention a few.

Contact us and find out how ConferenceTown.com teleconferencing software can help improve collaboration in your organization.