Management & HR 4.0: 10 tools for digital cooperation

Companys Like Google, Microsoft or WordPress, they free their employees when and where they work. Offices and fixed working hours are redundant, instead they work together worldwide via digital communication channels. What advantages and disadvantages do digital forms of communication offer? And what do you have to consider?

Tools for digital work

Dr. Anja C. Wagner advises organizations on digital Education and to modern workflows. Depending on the area of ​​application, different tools and work processes are used, as she explains: “For example, we regularly hold video conferences with Google Hangouts. The participants can do this Conversation log in an Etherpad document – ​​all together in real time or even beyond.”

The advantages for the consultant are on the Hand: “Everyone sees immediately what the other has contributed. Not only does this save time because you don't have to wait for others to edit it or not know exactly which version of a document is the latest. And: together you are more creative!”

This also applies to cooperation in closed facebook-Groups, Google+ communities, with Dropbox, Google Drive or the Google Office applications, in which the project participants can edit texts, presentations or Excel sheets together in real time or with a delay. Slack also serves as a eMail-Replacement and with Evernote, personal thoughts or notes are digitized and exchanged with each other. “For time sensitive Tasks we use Trello as project management environment. Here you can dynamically define tasks, deadlines and responsibilities, comment on them and work through them together,” explains Wagner.

Clear rules are necessary

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In order for digital collaboration to function smoothly, however klare Regulate and common goals are needed: “Great things can come about through digital collaboration – keyword collective Intelligence. But it takes trust,” Wagner is convinced.

Many companies are now using the advantages of virtual working environments, for example for Meetings, Further Training Or even in job interviews. This saves you time and Costs for lavish trips. According to the Virtual Teams Survey Report by RW3 CultureWizard, as early as 2012, 30.000 percent of the management and 87 percent of the employees in 50 companies surveyed were partially working virtually. Still, studies show how the monsters Recruiting Trends 2015, how great the skepticism still is, especially in Germany: 79,8 percent of those surveyed stated that flexible working hours posed a challenge for working together.

Reservations among employees and management

The reservations do not only come from the management, but also from the employees who Anxiety have more work due to absent colleagues or, conversely, being cut off from important information. Technical feasibility is not that Problem: As demonstrated by IRCAD Strasbourg, nowadays even virtual surgical procedures are not a problem, let alone digital conferences.

The RW3 study supports much more that building trust is a common challenge in decentralized teams: 75 percent of the respondents stated that it is difficult to develop trust in virtual teams. 79 percent complained too little time to build relationships and 71 percent too little sympathy. At 33 percent, half of the team members did not live in their own country, so working in different time zones Communication difficult and burdened. 70 percent are bothered by cultural differences in conflict management, especially since 41 percent have never met their virtual colleagues in person.

Legal uncertainties

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The topic of virtual work is also legally subject to imponderables. This is what the Federal Association of Labor Lawyers in companies recently did I aufmerksamthat self-determined working hours contradict the applicable labor law - and called for deregulation. And employees who use their private devices and tools to edit and store business data pose a security risk for data security and that should not be underestimated IT-Systems of companies.

The biggest problem, however, is probably the measurability of Performance be like executive Training and management consultant Roswitha A. van der Markt know from practice: “Executives often ask (me) how to perceive the performance of their employees when they don't see it?" To the Solution she recommends clear target agreements and collaboration tools such as chats, wikis or digital boards in which team members constantly discuss the Status and can share the results of their work, as well as knowledge databases in which Background available at any time and for everyone.

Employees must know goals and rules

Employees should know the goals and rules for working with IT and collaboration tools as well as mentors as contact persons: “Everyone must know where and how documents and results are divided into knowledge and Projectsdatabases are stored and which wording, which response times in communication, even in the case of conflicts, are common,” explains van der Markt. And interpersonal matters also count: “Video conferences also convey facial expressions, gestures and the mood. In addition, there should be room for informal communication without Objective created just for fun, such as the virtual coffee hour, as a virtual meeting at the coffee bar. And you should meet in person at least once or twice a year,” says the consultant van der Markt.

Virtual working presented companies and employees with major challenges. In order to cope with them, new work processes and structures often have to be created. Only then can this change succeed.

10 Popular Virtual Collaboration Tools

1. Trello organizes projects and individual tasks not in lists, but in index cards, with which the user can visually interact.
2. Asana lets Mutzer follow projects and tasks as well as search the entire project history. So you always stay up to date.
3. Wunderlist now belongs to Microsoft. The app applications are reduced to task management, notes, file attachments and comments and there is a business version.
4. Slack optimizes communication in workgroups. You can exchange messages, chat and collaborate on documents and integrate other online services.
5. EtherPad is a web-based editor for collaborative editing of text by multiple people in real time. All changes are immediately visible to all participants.
6. Evernote allows you to collect, organize, share, and find notes, documents, and photos in a variety of formats.
7. Dropbox is used for online data storage, but also for the exchange of data between different persons and devices.
8. Flow allows you to group and tag tasks into lists, have multiple users collaborate on and discuss a task, and share files.
9. Todoist lets you create and prioritize projects and subprojects as well as hierarchical tasks, attach files, assign appointments or create reports.
10. Conceptboard offers “online whiteboards” with an infinitely large work surface on which users can place and manage images and documents (PDF, Excel, Word, etc.). Text and audio chats as well as video conferences are possible.

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