Collaborative software

With the cold weather thawing now, the first few weeks of this month saw the UK snowed under for several days with up to 20% of the work force staying at home during the "snow days". The Centre for Economics and Business Research (cebr) predicted that this cost the British Economy approximately £900 million for each snow day we suffered.

The lost productivity from snow days leads to problems for both you and your staff:

• Drop in revenue - If you can't work or deliver services to your customers on snow days, you could stand to see your revenue drop significantly on those days
• Delayed payments - If your customers are also suffering from snow days, you could find payments from customers disrupted, and the interruption in your cash flow hitting your business
• Missed deadlines and targets - If your business is working to tight deadlines and targets, you could find snow days have a dramatic impact on your staff's productivity, meaning you have to adjust your original deadlines and targets further in the future. If you have service level agreements with customers, you could also find yourself hit with penalties if there is a significant slip in deadlines and targets.
• Increase in work backlog - With people ramping up to full speed after the Christmas holidays, we noticed that "business as usual" didn't start properly until this week of the (18th January onwards), a full 2 weeks after the new year! This was mainly due to the disruption of snow and now means staff and businesses find themselves with a much bigger backlog of work to catch-up after the Christmas holidays.

Unfortunately businesses can't control the weather, but what they can control is ensuring their staff has access to the information and tools they need to get on with their work regardless of where they're located.

With collaboration software like SambaJAM, staff can stay connected virtually over the web, without any loss of access to the key information and tools they use everyday in the office. For example:

• If you currently keep all your documents on your office desktops or shared network drives, most likely your staff will lose access to those outside the office. With web based collaboration software, not only can you ensure your staff still have access to the documents, you can also ensure they can search and edit documents easily. All they need is a web browser, and with online editing tools like Zoho, they don’t even need expensive Microsoft Office installed on their home PC or laptop to continue working.
• By using task management, you can still action and assign tasks to your team, even if you’re all sitting in different locations. This helps you keep things on track during the disruption.
• If you have all your information inside the collaboration platform, you can still search for the information and documents you need to complete your work without any disruption
• If you need your colleagues contact details, the profile pages can act as a replacement for your internal corporate directory, so staff can still get in touch with everyone from home
• You can use the social networking tools to keep your team connected and talking even if they’re sitting miles apart. They can post questions, ideas, issues as though its business as usual. Like a virtual office conversation on the web.

For your staff, the great thing about collaboration tools like SambaJAM, is if they use them day to day in the office, moving to another location will be seamless. All their information, documents and tools will still be there in the same place they left them, and as long as they have a browser to access them, you can ensure they don’t let the backlog of work after Christmas build up on snow days, making for a more relaxed return to work for both them and you.

If your business suffered as a result of the recent weather and you’d like to see how collaboration tools like SambaJAM can support remote working, please contact us here.