The secret of a successful startup is a productive team. All-star teams tend to be rich in talent and dedication, but most importantly, their team members are masters of collaboration.
Effective teamwork is especially valuable in early-stage startups, where the number of people available to carry the workload is limited, and it's essential for the result of team collaboration and communication to be greater than the sum of individual efforts.
Slack: A Tool to Enhance Communication?
Several tools exist to improve team collaboration, including digital workplace solutions. One of the most popular options is Slack, an online platform that focuses on connecting people and tools together in a single virtual space with multiple private and public chat rooms organized around different themes or projects.
Slack Can Drain Productivity
Quality work relies on focus and concentration as well as easy access to the right resources. Effective communication is the thread that binds it all together. However, Slack workspaces can rapidly become an environment of clutter with the "right now" culture that can drain rather than boost productivity.
Conversations in Slack happen all at once and all the time. Team members can get sucked into a vortex that requires sharing ideas at the moment of inception and answering inquiries as they arise, lest their thoughts disappear in a sea of comments and their questions and input risk getting lost.
Forget about clear, edited communications and fully developed ideas in Slack where being heard is often more important. There is no time to think. Distractions and an unhealthy sense of urgency become the workplace reality. Slack's fatal flaw is its fragmented organization.
Slack Can Hinder a Team's Efficiency
Projects run best when the relevant people have access to all needed materials in one place. But Slack, by its design, can become an endless maze of chats and file attachments. When employees aren't busy trying to keep up with the rodeo show of posts happening across channels, they're wasting time searching for materials.
Slack's chaotic and rapid nature often demands that employees split their attention between different tasks. In other words, employees stretch their multitasking skills at the cost of true productivity.
While multitasking is not always detrimental to productivity, mixing different tasks that all require thought and attention is. A constant shifting of attention from one task to another reduces performance on all tasks in the end. Employees trying to keep up with workplace chats cannot also devote their attention to actual work.
An Effective Digital Workplace Solution
So, what does a potent digital workplace solution look like? First, it brings work into focus. Then it combines all relevant information about a specific project into one space on one screen. It streamlines all relevant data and always makes that data accessible, even offline.
The data can be in any form, from research papers to YouTube videos. Instead of confronting you with a convoluted collection of chat channels, it helps you to focus on the information needed to complete projects. Team members can access these spaces across devices, and work on the move regardless of physical location. Communication between employees is project-focused since the ideal comment system allows workers to comment directly on project materials in context. Other features, such as assigning tasks and live updates, are seamlessly integrated.
Consider Infolio
Infolio is a digital collaboration solution that helps teams work productively. Infolio allows for the creation of customizable workspaces with different visual organization styles. Individuals or teams can create workspace boards on any subject and import information into the boards in any format. Collaborators can organize boards any way they like, just like working on a table in a real-world meeting room.
A team using Infolio has all the communication and collaboration tools they need in one place to perform at peak levels. Thanks to Infolio's elegant and powerful simplicity, its users can focus on solving problems and developing new products like All-stars. Want to learn what Infolio can do for your team at first hand? Give it a try today, free.
We created Infolio with love, and are committed to continually improving it. Your feedback is precious to us! In case you have ideas on how we can make Infolio better for you — please let us know at support@infolio.co.
