Good communication is foundational in building and maintaining personal relationships, while it can often be relegated to an afterthought in our business relationships.
Yet strong communication is one of the most important practices of any business. It is vital in dealing with stakeholders, from both internal and external customers to management, to staff, and colleagues. It can help a company avoid unintended costs, move more quickly, and boost overall productivity and efficiency. Realizing this, many companies are moving toward unified communications.
A general definition of unified communications is “the optimization and integration of communications to increase efficiency and productivity.” While that sounds reasonable, there are many ways of optimizing. Here, unified communications refer to integrating or combining various means of communication into a single system. This can vary by company but could include phone calls, IM chats, email, or other various methods. Unified communications like Teams and Slack are more business-oriented due to their inclusion of features for additional integration with other tools.
With this definition in mind, you can begin to see the benefits of unified communications. Here are three big ways unified communications can improve operational efficiency in your business.
Mobility, Accessibility, and Flexibility
Even before the global pandemic drove the rapid and widespread shift to remote working, this trend had already been in place across many industries and companies. While today’s workers value mobility and flexibility, remote working makes communication more difficult, and leaders, teammates, and colleagues must work harder to maintain it. A unified communications platform must integrate seamlessly and be easy to use. It will allow your organization the flexibility to work from anywhere while maintaining collaboration and productivity.
Employee Happiness, Focus, and Productivity
Once thought by managers to be a detriment to productivity, the recent spike in adoption of mobility and remote working in the past two years has shown that it is not only a feasible way to work but can be more productive for employees in many situations. Add to that an improved work-life balance by giving employees more time to spend with loved ones, on personal matters, or just time away from the office, and it has helped increase job satisfaction. Unified communications provide the ability to send and receive critical information any time, and to any employee, no matter where they may be. This can save time by preventing unnecessary meetings or presentations and focuses communication into shorter and more efficient messages that help your staff or team concentrate more time on their own tasks and projects, which can help increase their motivation and success.
Seamless Collaboration & Centralized Information
People collaborate when they share ideas for the goal or improvement of something. It’s a widely accepted axiom that improving collaboration can lead to greater innovation which drives organizational success. It’s why we hold brainstorming sessions or problem-solving meetings. Yet many workers report that there is not enough collaboration in their companies, often because obstacles exist such as appropriate and available channels for various types of collaboration. Unified communications let colleagues and teams form groups of varying sizes and associations that can be used to share suggestions, edits, links, files, or even just the type of chit-chat that can lead to big ideas. And all of it can be in one platform that is centralized, accessible, and widely used.
Summary
Good communication is essential to relationships in both the personal and business worlds. In business, good communication is vital in dealing with internal and external stakeholders, can help avoid costs, move quickly, and boost productivity. Unified communications are the optimization and integration of communications to increase efficiency and productivity. It includes centralized platforms that allow multi-user conversations, sharing of electronic information, and other forms of flexible collaboration between employees anywhere in the world at any time, enabling more effective remote working and mobility. This not only increases business productivity but also leads to higher job satisfaction among today’s workers.