A step-by-step guide to getting your business working social

“Social” in the enterprise context means connecting people. It means associating work, content, knowledge or data with the person who created it. It means being able to see something that someone has done within a collaboration platform and viewing their profile where you can see what else they’ve done and get an idea of their field of expertise. Getting to know the people that you work with helps you to find right person with the right knowledge for the right job. Working social means that knowledge sharing can become a side-effect of working. Everything created within a social collaboration platform is visible to colleagues who have access, so knowledge is instantly shared and information is immediately communicated.

Social business, on the other hand, refers to the concept of optimising the way an organisation runs in order to benefit its entire ecosystem, from owners to employees to clients. This is done by instilling a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing and open communication throughout the business. The goal of this is to become more effective as an organisation, help people get their work done, and leverage human capital in order to ultimately become a more successful company read more.

Gartner's Nexus of Forces and the Future of Collaboration

HighQ Collaborate uniquely combines advanced document management and file sharing with leading-edge enterprise social collaboration, productivity and knowledge sharing tools that allow users to get their work done more efficiently and securely share information with internal and external users in one unified space, from any desktop or mobile device.

Breaking your addiction to email… It’s tough but possible.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute report The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technology, which uses IDC data, workers spend 28 per cent of their time reading, writing or responding to email.
If you took email away from lawyers they would feel less productive and isolated. This feeling would be a genuine reaction because over the last ten years Outlook has become the hub of productivity (ironically). I wrote about the changing role of email in business here. I guess you could say that a loss of productivity would be true of most people to begin with, however change is a-coming.
Now, I’m not saying that email is going to be die, because it won’t. It will always have a place in business, but perhaps more aligned to what it was designed to do. I firmly believe that much of the communication that happens over email can be considered a burden on an individual’s productivity and reduces an organisations ability to leverage its human network because it is mis-used as a tool.
What are my issues with email?
1. I am forced to action every item. This is a burden, even when it is a simple delete action.
2. Email is inherently insecure and you have no control over a message once it has been sent.
3. My mailbox is a information silo. This reduces discoverability and encourages a poor sharing culture.
4. It limits my ability to find information or experts because I have to know who to ask a question of.
5. Reply all. Need I say more?
So what are the alternatives? There are many out there but a secure enterprise collaboration platform like HighQ Collaborate (shameless plug) provides all the tools required to enhance many of the existing work practices that exist within law firms. Whether that be sharing a file securely with a client, creating a knowledge community, managing your matters or just encouraging a connected organisation.
So you have identified the type of technology (and I’m making the assumption it will work), but how do we reduce the dependance on email? read more.

Does home working stifle collaboration?

Earlier this year Yahoo!’s Chief Exec, Marissa Mayer, announced that she was axing the company’s working from home policy and ordered all remote workers back into their nearest Yahoo! office by June this year, or they faced losing their jobs. She cited one of her reasons as being the need for better collaboration, and that this is done best when people are in the same office.
Is this the harsh truth or outdated mentality? The latter if you ask me.
To suggest employees working from home limit an organisation’s ability to collaborate implies that that same organisation can’t collaborate with regional or overseas offices, external partners or clients properly. Whilst this may be the bleak reality for businesses whose technology systems are out of date, forward looking companies which have adopted cutting-edge enterprise social collaboration tools shouldn’t have these insecurities read more.

How can collaboration software create a knowledge sharing culture?

In today's economy, innovation is extremely important. That is why knowledge sharing is creeping higher and higher up the priority list of companies eager to become forward-thinkers and leaders in their industries. Historically, corporate culture has revolved around knowledge hoarding, where employees feel that they are safe in their jobs only as long as they are the only person with the knowledge to do it. This is not conducive to innovation, however. In order to nurture an innovative business, companies should instead adopt a knowledge sharing culture. First of all, it's helpful to identify exactly what a knowledge sharing culture is. Knowledge sharing means providing information and know-how to help others solve problems, develop ideas and implement or improve procedures. Knowledge can be shared through all modes of communication, and a knowledge sharing culture encourages as much communication as possible.

Knowledge sharing in this way has been shown to increase and speed up productivity, enhance team performance and morale, increase sales growth and revenue, and above all foster innovation. Obviously, these are all things that any good company wants to achieve. Enterprise data collaboration platforms, like HighQ Collaborate, have been designed to make knowledge sharing easy by embedding it into the way people and companies work read more.

Working in the open: benefits of socialising team collaboration

From school-age we are trained to keep our work private until we’re happy that it is finished and the best that it can be. Our work is our own until we are ready to take a breath and send it out into the harsh, critical world.
Today, more and more companies are embracing team collaboration software, which means that employees have to adapt to a new working style that goes against what we’ve all been taught. Instead, they must work in a way that is open, transparent and collaborative read more.

8 Reasons Enterprise Social Collaboration is here to stay

Digital has changed the way we live and work forever. In handing us the entire distribution channel it has made the world smaller, cheaper to navigate and also more social. Initially such change left businesses defensive. Challenged by the way employees could 

communicate freely many organisations feared it would create inefficiencies and distraction read more.