Over the past three years, companies have had to learn a new way to collaborate, not only with their clients and partners, but also within their own organizations. Initially, nearly everyone was learning on the fly – trying to figure out how to use Zoom and Microsoft Teams to make their companies prosper when we couldn’t be in the same room at the same time. But now that things have gotten back to ‘normal’, we are still in need of efficient collaboration because the way of doing things and how people think has changed. Not to mention, collaboration is important to a business no matter the circumstances.

As Vanilla Ice once said, “Stop. Collaborate and listen”

Collaboration can be a tricky thing in general. It’s not uncommon for internal teams, external partners as well as customers and clients to be across time zones and countries, in addition to the recent trend of many companies adopting a hybrid schedule, where employees are able to work remotely. Organizations are looking for ways to continue to be successful and productive without missing a beat. Being able to collaborate effectively plays an important part in the success of a business.

Collaboration isn’t just limited to working together within a company either. Collaboration is needed across the board – with clients, with partners, and with vendors.

Insights from an article that appeared on TheWorkback highlight studies that have shown that when leaders enable collaboration, employees are more likely to complete tasks, and the companies that they work for often perform better and report higher revenue. Sounds great, right? Not so fast, because it also cautions that too much collaboration can inhibit a team’s performance. So how does a company balance that fine line? In today’s hybrid work world, what does this mean? How do we make it all work?

How do we collaborate smarter and more efficiently than ever before and achieve success?

Working Together More Efficiently

Whether you are working with others in your company or working with clients and/or partners throughout the country and abroad, being able to collaborate in a smart way makes a company more successful. An important first step is focusing on your employees. Having the right people working on a project at the right time based on their expertise and skills. You also need people who are committed to a project, can trust one another, are clear communicators, are not afraid of differing opinions and conflict, are accountable and are aligned toward achieving a common goal.

Easier said than done, but there are tools to help as well.

Tools to Help You Collaborate

More than ever, there are a variety of ways to accomplish a collaborative effort successfully, especially with the wide variety of marketing collaboration software tools that are on the market. No matter what industry you are in, what size your team is, whether you are remote, in-office, hybrid, or in another country, marketing collaboration technology can help with:

• Communication
• Productivity
• Teamwork
• Organization
• Efficiency
• Task Management
• Scheduling
• Data sharing
• Transparency
• Content Creation

There are plenty of marketing collaboration software programs out there, like Asana, Zoom, Canva, Dropbox and Microsoft Teams, etc. that can help with things like product management, task assignment, video conferencing, editing copy and design, etc. It’s just a matter of finding the right tool marketing collaboration software that works best for you and your team. 

These types of tools not only help you to streamline tasks and communicate more effectively, but they also help to manage projects and prioritize tasks to keep things moving forward without missing emails sitting in your inbox, phone calls that go unanswered and edits that are bypassed because there is no one true shared document. Using collaboration tools helps to keep everyone on the same page and on the right track, without missing a beat. They help to mitigate mistakes. They help stop the hamster wheel insanity loop.