As your business grows and processes become increasingly complicated, you’ll inevitably be searching for products or tools that can help. Having a central location for things like administration, communication, resource management, and product training will soon become critical. You need a digital workspace.

Finding the right product will absolutely boost effectiveness throughout your team and improve communication and collaboration across your entire business; but there are certainly a number of challenges.

I’ve had the unique privilege of experiencing this challenge from a few different perspectives. As a client-side marketer, I led the implementation of a custom-built solution that was tailored to my brand. Over my career I’ve also been on teams that used off-the-shelf SAAS products. And most recently, our team here at Creative Guild has been tasked with a number of custom builds for clients, such as Tortoise Restaurant Group and Whirlpool Canada.

These experiences, coupled with our growing list of clients and their needs, has led Creative Guild to develop our own proprietary solution, modzee™.

But Why?

As a manager, your goal should be to give your team the information and resources they need to do great work, and then get out of their way. Empower individuals and teams to perform their best work and promote the sharing of information and best practices, independent of business function or physical geography.

Here are some realities to set the stage:

1. Technology
   Advancements in development and open-sourced tools have allowed tech firms of all sizes to build new, compelling products and to compete with the big players for your business. The end result for you as the consumer is any number of product options at a price point that is approachable for any size of business.
2. Expectations
   You don’t have to look any further than the raise of popular collaborative tools such as Slack, Wrike, Basecamp and Jira to demonstrate my point. Modern teams have come to expect availability and clarity – on demand. The right information needs to be in the right place, whenever it’s needed.

Picking the Right Product for you

Features and Functions

The majority of products will share similar core features (communications, resource management, etc.) however, you should be looking for above and beyond features that can further assist in your work flow.

Consider the following:

• Reporting/analytics – understand how your team engages with your intranet, and what information is valuable to them.
• Gated access – can you restrict access to certain work groups or teams? Not only is this useful from a privacy standpoint, but also ensures users are only seeing information that is important to them, without all the clutter.
• Social groups or forums – giving your wider team the ability to communicate and collaborate is paramount.

Integrations

Creating your digital workplace means bringing as much function as possible into a single high-performing platform.

Integrations to look for:

• Storage options – Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive
• Business productivity tools – Slack, Trello, Zendesk and Salesforce
• Product suites: Office 365 and G Suite

Best Practices

Do not overcomplicate

Implementing a new platform is tricky. Be careful not to add complication to your existing processes and procedures. Assign an internal champion to take the lead and be the gatekeeper. Remember, the whole goal is to create efficiency, not work!

Communication Style

Do not use your new platform simply as a broadcast tool for management. Top down communication is old school. Empower your team and facilitate open communication and engagement across your business. This will increase visibility across work groups and encourage usership and engagement.

Commitment

Commit to your platform – end of story. This is the only way to create the appropriate culture and behaviours throughout your team and partners, all the way from the top down. Have an absolute commitment to your content. Whether it’s a memo, HR document or training courseware, it needs to be the latest and greatest. Nothing kills credibility faster than old outdated information.

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There are a ton of great options at some pretty reasonable prices.  The key for you will be finding the right platform that can add value to your business and your process. If you’re interested in learning more about our platform, you can find more information here – www.modzee.com