Whether you’re bringing together a team of experts for a legal proceeding or assembling a working group for some other enterprise, collaboration is an essential feature of the current business environment. Even the most cursory review of business reporting pegs collaboration as the major buzzword going into 2018, but the buzz is more about the methods we’re using to collaborate, not the collaboration itself.
Everything Old is New Again
Anyone who routinely works with other people—which is to say the sweeping majority of us—already know collaboration isn’t a new concept, nor is it a simply a fad. The truth is, we’ve all been collaborating for a long time. We’ve been attending the meetings, sending the emails, attaching the files. We’ve been talking, sharing, reviewing, revising, strategizing, and none of this happens in a vacuum. Because our work relies on bringing increasingly specialized experts and personnel together for a common cause, we have to collaborate to reach the goals of our companies and firms, to provide our clients with the best possible service and outcomes.
Everything New is New, Too
What is changing are the ways we work together and the technology we use to do it. Our teams of specialized experts may be scattered around the country, or even the globe. Flexible scheduling means workers may telecommute from home a few days a week. Firms are more reliant on contractors and consultants who may work exclusively from home or other non-office locations. In 21st century workplace, the workplace can be literally anywhere. Technology allows us to bridge the limitations of time and place to bring these teams together.
Traditional forms of collaboration such as meetings and email still have their place in the current collaboration landscape, but other tools are gaining traction to facilitate contact between team members. For example, video conferencing has become more reliable and accessible.
Almost every major tech company has introduced some form of group chat platform designed for business. Slack led the way with its application for group messaging and collaborative workflow. Microsoft has introduced Teams as part of the Office 365 platform. Google has followed suit by shifting the old Hangouts app to two separate apps: Chat and Meet. Chat allows group conversations with connections to the suite of Google office apps, such as Google Docs, which are already collaborative in the sense they allow multiple users to access and change files simultaneously. Meet is a platform that uses video conferencing in conjunction with those other Google services. Even Facebook has gotten in on the act with its growing Workplace platform.
As we rely on our smartphones and other devices, AI assistants that are becoming standard in our homes, such as Amazon’s Alexa, are coming to the workplace. These apps operate across multiple devices, allowing accessibility from the office, the corner coffee shop, or your couch. Other collaboration apps are industry specific, such as the software driving electronic records in medical environments.
Even at The Records Company, we use collaborative technologies to facilitate our services. Clients can contact us through traditional means, anytime, from anywhere in the world. They can track the status of their records retrieval and access delivered records through our online portal and receive automatic updates as we track their status internally. These features allow our clients to seamlessly integrate The Records Company into their own collaboration models.