If you have a business, work in a business, or are just interested in business, it’s likely you’ll have heard of unified communications. There are a wide range of benefits that come with unified communications – more effective teamwork being just one of them.
Before deciding to invest in unified communications, it is important to know exactly how it can benefit your team and help them to work better together.
Keep reading to find out how unified communications can help employees work more effectively with each other.
Unified communications can foster team collaboration
With increased remote workforces, it’s rare that teams meet in person anymore. Unified communications offer things like team chats and file sharing applications that help employees to communicate effectively between different locations, and even across time zones.
Another way that unified communications benefits businesses is the reliable cross-platform user experience, where everyone is using the same apps on their devices. It enables users to collaborate in real time with ease, no matter where they are in the world. Most unified communications services have video components too to help reduce the need for travel to attend in-person meetings.
Increased organisational dexterity
When employees work effectively with each other, the business will be more productive and organisational. Good organisation has a positive impact on the business as a whole. Management may only see unified communication as a functional piece of equipment, but when they see the value that it can have on productivity and how it can lead to better business outcomes, the overall benefit of unified communications will start to resonate.
Improved IT operations
As a general rule of thumb, IT departments will be responsible for effectively managing a unified communications platform throughout the company. However, unified communications benefits IT staff by allowing them to remotely roll out applications across every working environment, as it is all managed through an online portal.
The ability to manage a range of communications applications in one place is also beneficial – especially when it cuts out the need for employees to seek communication tools that aren’t within the control of the IT team.
For example, shadow IT presents continuing difficulties for IT because they don’t have control over the network resources. In a situation like this, IT would be only too happy for a unified and comprehensive application to become the new communications system. This would prevent anyone from being able to choose any communications tools they like personally, but that might potentially put the organisation at risk.
Consistency
Consistency is key when communicating with others, especially in the workplace. Having effective communication systems like unified communications in place will maintain consistency, and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
This links back in with the organizational point above. Companies that are consistent are better organized than those that are constantly changing. As such, consistency helps employees to navigate through their days, being confident that there are solutions in place to any problems they may encounter.
Now that you have a better idea of how unified communications can help employees to work more effectively with each other, all that is left to do is find the new business communications system that works best for you, and see those benefits in action.