TELECOMS
Given the option,
employees will
gladly channel the
majority of their
communication with
co-workers through
a team workstream
rather than email.
The new unified communication
Once the
workstream
communication
habit is established,
it becomes much
easier to layer
other collaborative
activities on top.
This turns out to be the
stickiest alternative to email the
workplace has ever seen.
For years, despite its limitations,
email has beaten back all
challengers as a default mode of
communication within the enterprise.
Yet given the option, employees are
showing they will gladly channel
the majority of their communication
with co-workers through a team
workstream rather than email.
This is particularly true for tight-
knit teams coordinating ongoing
projects or business processes.
Once the workstream
communication habit is
established, it becomes much
easier to layer other, richer
collaborative activities on top, such
as sharing files, sending tasks,
calendaring events, sharing notes
or launching online meetings.
Persistent team conversations
set the context. The author of an
email is supposed to establish
context with the subject line –
something that makes perfect
sense for more formal, external
communication with a customer
or a partner company. Team
chat excels where email is most
awkward – at handling ongoing
conversations about the same
project or topic, where the
‘subject’ is always the same and
what’s important is the body of
the message. All the files and
other team artifacts, such as
tasks assigned and completed,
can be conserved within that
same space.
Voice, video, and online
meetings are a natural extension.
You can search the user directory
for co-workers to call or video
Moving to a more completely
unified communication and
collaboration platform means
erasing artificial distinctions
between communication,
collaboration, and productivity.
Mobile phones won’t be the
only ‘smart’ phones; we need
smart desk phones that
connect naturally to workplace
applications. Workplace
communication and collaboration
tools in the cloud will allow us to
shift from text based messaging
and file sharing to real-time voice
and video calls without losing the
context of an interaction.
One of the hottest trends
in collaboration today is team
messaging or ‘workstream
communication and collaboration.’
Compared with big enterprise
social networking suites,
workstream products tend to be
much leaner and optimised for
sending quick group messages.
July 2017 | 23