Where Does the Team Collaboration Market Stand in 2023?

Exploring the Team Collaboration Market in 2023

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Team Collaboration Market Guide
CollaborationMeeting Rooms and DevicesInsights

Published: December 13, 2022

Rob Scott

Rob Scott

Publisher

How we understand and define team collaboration has changed drastically in the last few years. While most business leaders will agree “collaboration” has always been essential to business success, how we bring employees together to share ideas and knowledge has evolved.

Traditional office spaces and boardrooms with shared whiteboards and desks are being replaced with team collaboration platforms – digital environments built to form the new “virtual hub” for work. Today’s teams don’t rely on post-it notes and memos to keep them connected but instead interact with a wide variety of virtual tools for video and audio conferencing, file sharing, and meetings.

For many, the growth of the team collaboration market is evident in the evolving demand for team collaboration software. According to Fortune Business Insights, the space is growing at a CAGR of 13.2%, expected to reach a value of around $40.79 billion by 2028.

Let’s explore team collaboration as it stands today.

Defining the Team Collaboration Market in 2023

Team collaboration is just as important as ever, if not more important. According to the Harvard Business Review, collaborative work now consumes around 85% of any person’s work week. However, the way we collaborate has evolved.

Employees have grown increasingly distributed in an age of remote and hybrid work, leading to new demands for software and hardware solutions capable of synergizing disconnected staff.

In the past, the “market” for team collaboration focused heavily on physical acquisitions. Companies invested by building effective meeting rooms and purchasing hardware for shared spaces, like whiteboards and desks.

Today, while hardware still plays an important role in bringing teams together, the focus has shifted away from large meeting spaces towards webcams, plug-and-play room kits, and similar tools designed to work alongside team collaboration platforms.

In the modern world, team collaboration is a “virtual” experience, with 60% of executives in a PwC study saying they expect to spend more on aligning virtual employees in the years to come. This new landscape is also plagued with new challenges. Companies must rediscover how to connect their employees when many professionals no longer share the same physical space.

Bridging the gap between “hybrid workers” has become a core goal for countless companies, mainly as 52% of remote workers say they now feel less connected to their employees than when working in the office.

The Core Components of Team Collaboration in 2023

As the way we collaborate continues to shift, the way companies invest in team collaboration has changed on a fundamental level. It’s estimated that in-person meetings will account for only 25% of team conversations by 2024, meaning businesses need to double down on enabling digital collaboration instead.

For most companies, creating the dream team of the future will involve:

  • Building new work hubs: As the digital world replaces the traditional office as the new workplace, companies need to develop virtual environments where teams can easily share ideas, access tools, and interact. This leads to rapid investment in various integrated tools, from UCaaS platforms with integrated collaboration features for meetings, conferencing, and file sharing to workforce management and engagement software.
  • Aligning hybrid workers: Although countless employees are now working in distributed environments, 49% still say collaboration is easier in the office. As a result, companies are looking for ways to keep remote and in-office workers aligned and engaged. AI tools are emerging to help schedule hybrid meetings and boost company culture. Businesses are also looking for new ways to help foster the inclusion of remote workers in meetings and conversations to reduce the risk of workplace silos.
  • Keeping teams secure: With more information traveling over the cloud between employees, companies are forced to rethink their compliance, privacy, and security strategies. Many organizations are beginning to experiment with zero-trust security architecture and advanced access controls to help protect data.

The Trends Approaching Team Collaboration

Although team collaboration has changed drastically in recent years, thanks mainly to hybrid and remote work adoption, the space isn’t evolving yet.

As organizations continue to look for new ways to bring their teams together, boost productivity, and minimize risk, we’re seeing recent trends emerge in the collaborative space, such as:

  • Immersive technology: While video and audio conferencing features are excellent for connecting teams in a digital environment, they often lack the sense of “presence” achieved in real-world environments. Because of this, many companies have started exploring “extended reality” as a new way to bring staff together. Investment in immersive tools will likely grow as companies continue exploring concepts like the metaverse.
  • External collaboration: In the past, many collaboration tools have focused on building and maintaining relationships between internal staff members while protecting networks from external intrusion. However, companies will need to continue interacting with third-party organizations and contractors in a distributed workplace. This will make finding a solution capable of facilitating safe external collaboration more crucial.
  • Asynchronous collaboration: When the pandemic hit, video meetings and scheduled discussions became a core component of the new age of team collaboration. However, employees quickly started to suffer from “meeting overload.” Increasingly, brands are discovering the benefits of asynchronous meeting environments, which help to give team members more autonomy and control over their work schedules.
  • AI and automation: The demand for more interactive and inclusive meetings will pave the way for new solutions, which will help to boost the quality of future team collaboration sessions. AI solutions that help to bridge the gaps between team members with better eye contact and video positioning are growing more important. Similarly, distributed employees rely more heavily on AI to help them tackle issues autonomously, without the help of IT teams and specialists.

Team collaboration continues to be a crucial concept in any business environment, but it’s also a dynamic idea that constantly evolves to suit the changing world. Who knows what team collaboration could mean in the years to come?

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