Social Collaboration: It’s Like Facebook for Field Work

There’s a lot of buzz about social collaboration and its benefits for field teams. The concept refers to processes that help multiple people or groups interact and share information to achieve common goals. In many instances, the cloud is the medium by which this collaboration take place. So how can your business capitalize on this phenomenon? Read on to learn more.

Ease of Use

Why would a field team manager want to employ a social collaboration tool for their mobile workers? One perk is its extreme ease of use. Certain tools are designed with social media paradigms in mind so that users can adopt them immediately with little to no training beforehand. It’s unlikely that employees read a manual or spoke with a customer service representative before they started using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Similarly, modern social collaboration tools operate with the end user in mind, making them completely painless to work with. This advantage lifts a huge weight off managers’ shoulders, who are often forced to deal with reluctance from their teams when trying to implement a new technology. Besides their simplicity, social collaboration tools provide numerous other benefits for both managers and mobile workers that help organizations work smarter and more efficiently.  

See What Others See

Organizations that utilize a social collaboration app empower their mobile employees to learn from each other and ultimately perform their jobs more effectively while delivering better customer service. When users browse social networks like Facebook, they stay connected with their friends through posts on a news feed and notifications. Likewise, social collaboration tools equipped with an activity stream and notification settings let employees see what their counterparts are doing in the field, which encourages teamwork and healthy competition. Both increase productivity, as field teams will either work more cooperatively to complete tasks or work harder to receive recognition.

Access to information about what others are doing throughout the workday allows employees to comment on each other's work, share secrets for success, or signal any red flags that may inhibit job performance. Field teams can use this knowledge to position themselves ahead of competitors and delight customers by always being in contact about conditions that could affect their work. This connectivity helps individuals execute tasks with greater proficiency and strengthens the efficacy of the entire field team.

Develop “Team”

One of the primary reasons why it’s critical to develop a sense of “team” within a mobile workforce is so that employees will work together to accomplish company-wide objectives. Team members who feel camaraderie towards their peers can motivate each other to achieve universal goals. Moreover, team cohesion promotes job engagement, which leads to a boost in productivity and reduction in turnover when present. Nevertheless, it can be challenging to cultivate cohesion when employees spend much of their workday isolated from other members of an organization.

Enter social collaboration tools. Paul Trotter of CIO.com explains, “Many available tools give employees a sense of online community and help forge connections between different parts of the business and your customers.” For example, giving mobile employees the ability to stay in constant contact with each other allows individuals to coach others who may encounter roadblocks that prevent success. These types of strong communication practices promote a sense of belonging within mobile employees and enable field teams to reach their fullest potential.

Social collaboration provides numerous advantages for field teams and augments their overall performance. Their simplicity and intuitiveness make them readily available for immediate use. What’s more, they afford team members insight into what others are doing throughout the day, thus allowing them to learn from one another and feel a stronger sense of connection. When field teams become more efficient and united, the entire organization feels the ripple effect of that success. To learn more about Repsly’s social collaboration features, click here!