Collaboration and productivity are closely linked. Teams need to be able to work seamlessly together and share knowledge to drive businesses towards their goals. However, empowering employees to collaborate effectively isn’t always as simple as it seems. For instance, one study found that employees consider up to 72% of their meetings to be unproductive.
Simply allowing staff members to share ideas and insights with the right meeting software and spaces isn’t enough. Companies need to ensure they’re investing in the right spaces, technology, and resources, to enable strategic, impactful teamwork.
To achieve this, organizations need the right data. Leveraging insights gathered from collaboration platforms, devices, meeting rooms, and more, ensures companies can nurture productivity by adapting their investments and environments to the needs of their teams.
Here’s how you can use data to maximize productivity and collaboration in 2024.
Step 1: Use Data to Redesign the Hybrid Office
The workplace has evolved. Though companies are actively encouraging employees back into office environments, only a third of CEOs from leading companies believe they’ll implement a full “office-based” workplace strategy in the next three years. Hybrid and flexible work is becoming the new norm, which means that larger meeting and conference spaces are becoming less crucial.
While there may still be some office environments which rely on larger meeting spaces, many will find themselves shifting to new workplace design strategies in the months ahead. Focus spaces and smaller huddle rooms are becoming increasingly common in the hybrid workplace.
Transforming a large conference room space into a series of smaller desk spaces could offer companies an exceptional way to not only reduce costs, but improve productivity and collaboration. After all, employees can only work effectively together when they have access to the right resources.
With data-driven insights into the spaces that employees use, and the technologies they use when in those environments (from laptops to webcams), businesses can identify how to redesign the office with a focus on productivity. They can determine whether a series of focus spaces, enabled with tools for video conferencing will improve productivity more than larger meeting rooms.
They can also determine which innovations may improve the collaboration experience for staff members, such as investing in new XR technologies, conferencing equipment, or BYOD solutions.
Additionally, Alfredo Ramirez, CEO of Vyopta, says, “The workforce must continually evaluate, test, learn, and optimize new applications and best practices to build trust, set expectations, and leverage collaboration intelligence to scale results."
Step 2: Leverage Data to Mitigate Collaboration Roadblocks
Technology is the key to empowering and supporting collaboration in today’s era of hybrid work. Unfortunately, all solutions, from endpoints and devices, to meeting room software and collaboration tools can encounter technical issues. These issues, when not identified quickly, can lead to significant disruptions in workflows, lost productivity, and problems with collaboration.
According to a study by Vyopta, in 20% of all meetings, at least one person is likely to encounter a quality experience issue that harms their ability to communicate and collaborate. To address this problem, companies need the right data.
First, they need an ecosystem that allows them to collect insights from all of the devices, spaces, and software solutions employees use to collaborate overtime. A comprehensive view of the collaborative technology stack can make it easier to detect roadblocks and issues that harm productivity.
