6 ways technology can improve collaboration in the workplace

In 1957, Monsanto’s ‘House of the Future’ opened at Disneyland. The attraction had a smart kitchen with ‘cold zones’ instead of a traditional refrigerator, along with electric-powered lowering storage cabinets. The bathroom was equipped with a sink that adjusts to height and a closed-circuit television receiver displaying whoever’s standing at your front door. 

Today, we can control lights, music, and temperature with our voice (thanks Alexa) and have a plethora of tools that help us whip up dinner with little effort, from the Thermomix and Instant Pot to the Air Fryer and Sous Vide.

Whether it’s life imitating art or the other way around, technology continuously changes the way we live and work. More recently, the AI boom had workers across industries wondering whether the technology will eventually go out of style or change the workplace forever.

However, AI is neither a passing fad nor a terrifying technology about to take all our jobs: It's a powerful tool that can take over busy work and free team members up to be more creative, more collaborative, and better communicators. 

You can modernize your team and get ahead of the curve by adopting AI and other technologies to enhance productivity and teamwork. Here’s how.

Want better team collaboration? There’s a tool for that.
Switchboard helps teams work better together with persistent project rooms—with a built-in AI assistant—that make everyone an active participant. 
Learn more

How can technology help collaboration in the workplace? 6 tools for better teamwork.

You’re already using 50 different tools at work, whether it’s a business intelligence platform, virtual meeting software, or a design and prototyping app. Finding and deploying the right tech to perform better is only half the story though—you’ve also got to keep on top of all the latest trends and know when to jump on the bandwagon or let it drive right by.

For example, you probably didn’t rush out to buy your team brand new VR headsets when metaverse meetings became a brief fad. But you do know your team needs to be seriously considering how AI can make them huge time savings in their daily work.

Right now, one of the most significant ways technology boosts collaboration is by cutting down the time spent on mundane tasks. AI can save employees countless hours, from debugging code to writing copy, giving them more time to put their heads together and deliver more impactful work.

Here are six examples of how technology can improve collaboration in the workplace. 

1. Get organized with a digital workspace

If you want to help your people work together better, you need to give them the right tool for it. Your employees need an online space where they can collaborate just as well as if they were working face-to-face, and that’s where Switchboard can help. 

Switchboard is a collaborative digital workspace that organizes all the apps and tools a team uses into meeting and project rooms—and makes everything instantly multiplayer. It’s designed to nurture team connection, collaboration, and productivity through intuitive meeting and project rooms for both synchronous and asynchronous work.

Your team can communicate in real-time with video, audio, chat, polls, and emoji reactions without having to share their screens. ‍Plus, the persistent virtual rooms save all your browser-based apps and docs where you left them, so you can even jump in and work between meetings.

AI-generated note summaries give an overview of what happened during a call or brainstorming session, and the tool has a helpful chatbot that can help you with tasks like quick term definitions and ideation.

With a digital workspace, your employees always have somewhere to turn to when they need to brainstorm, ask a question, or even just catch up with colleagues whether or not they work in an office or remotely. This helps you bake collaboration into the way your team works, centering your approach on teamwork.

2. Use the right channels to get your message across 

Even if you have a digital workspace for collaboration and file sharing, your people need a tool that helps them communicate with each other. So, give your employees the right channels for staying in touch, from instant messaging to async videos. 

A tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams helps your people share information and ideas in the moment. This is essential for collaborative work and building team unity. Whether your team works in-person or states apart, they need to have quick, spontaneous interactions without needing to schedule a meeting every time.

In Switchboard, you can record a walkthrough video to help your team interact with the room when you’re not there. That way, you can show them exactly how to find what they’re looking for. Asynchronous video is perfect for when employees need to share complex ideas without requiring them to hop on a phone or video call. 

Having a few different channels in your tech stack means people can communicate according to their personal preference or the task at hand. It also means you can collaborate with colleagues in different departments as they would with the person sitting next to them. Even if your team all work in the same office, encouraging async communication using messaging or video apps means people can prioritize their work and set boundaries around responding to requests.

3. Simplify your workflows using automations

The “Home of the Future” was designed to simplify daily tasks, giving people more time back in the day. You can do the same for your people by encouraging them to simplify their workflows with automation software. 

Tools like Zapier and Make help you automate your workflows with connections to thousands of apps so you can take time-consuming manual tasks off your people. This works by setting if this, then that triggers and actions, ensuring a desired action event automatically takes place as soon as a trigger event occurs.

For example, you can create an automation to notify your team in Slack every time a lead fills out the contact form on your website, meaning no one has to spend their time following up manually. Or you can set up a trigger to automatically create tasks in Asana from an email or Slack message, reducing the time your team spends on administrative chores. 

By setting up automated workflows, you give employees more time to spend on what matters, like collaboration with stakeholders and creative problem-solving. 

4. Map out timelines and delegate tasks with a project management tool

Another essential collaboration tool is project management software. When your people rely on their own personal calendars and to-do lists to keep track of deliverables, it becomes nearly impossible to coordinate efforts across your team. 

However, using a specialized tool like Asana helps ensure everyone knows what they need to be doing and who they should be collaborating with. The tool lets you organize deadlines, delegate tasks, and leave comments to keep everyone in the loop. 

Additionally, Asana has AI functions that can save employees even more time, as the tool helps users draft documents, summarize text, come up with ideas, write meeting agendas, and set action items. 

On top of helping your team coordinate their efforts (and prevent them from being siloed), Asana's AI features save them reduce mundane tasks, giving them back more time in the day for impactful work. 

Pro tip: For increased visibility, open up Asana in Switchboard. That way, team members can ask questions about deadlines and move them around as they see fit, get a better understanding of their responsibilities, and see where they can lend a hand to coworkers.

5. Turn data into useful insights with an analytics platform

Analyzing customer behavior and user metrics is essential to creating a product people want to use, but doing so manually is time-consuming. Plus, poring over data isn’t a one-and-done task–it’s something you have to do consistently. 

Analytics software does the grunt work for you so your team can focus on brainstorming how to build the best possible product. Amplitude, for example, makes it easy to experiment with A/B testing, then analyze what works and what doesn’t. 

Its customer data platform helps you draw in data across all your teams, simplifying cross-departmental collaboration efforts. Additionally, the tool has AI features that help you gain valuable insights faster, like its “Ask Amplitude” language model or AI-powered data assistant. 

When your team can spend less time stuck in spreadsheets and trying to draw conclusions from disorganized data, they can spend more time building products. For example, your UX research team can devote fewer resources to poring over data and spend more time on what’s important–getting to know your customers better and brainstorming on how to deliver what users want most. 

6. Spend less time on writing and more time on brainstorming

For your marketing team or UX writers, coming up with the right words can sometimes eat up the good part of a day. Then tack on the time required to check for spelling and grammatical errors, and we’re looking at a few days for one copywriter to put together a landing page. 

By harnessing specialized technology and AI tools, your people can speed up the writing process and spend more time on creative brainstorming. For example, Grammarly checks for spelling mistakes, as well as suggests ways to make sentences more grammatically correct or readable. The tool’s AI writing assistant, GrammarlyGO, helps you easily adjust tone and formality, rewriting sentences to better fit your preferred voice. 

Another time-saving tool is Copy.ai, which helps you generate social media posts, website copy, and blog content instantly. This software also has a Chat by Copy.ai feature, an AI tool that lets you search the internet for up-to-date sources, quickly generate personalized content, and repurpose existing content for social media posts or newsletters. 

That isn’t to say these tools take all the creativity out of writing. In fact, the opposite is true. With less time spent on rewriting for clarity and checking for mistakes, your team can focus more on how to emulate your voice, position your brand, and create content and copy that resonates. 

6 benefits of better workplace collaboration

If you think collaboration is stagnating at your company, it might be time to do a quick tech audit. Create a dedicated room on Switchboard, get each department to add their tools, and see where you’ve got silos or duplication.

If your product marketing team is successfully using PowerBI for market analysis and segmentation, but your sales team uses an outdated CRM for their own reporting, perhaps you can find a compromise where both teams use PowerBI—and can even benefit from each other’s data.

Why? Not only will it make a few savings in your tech budget, but you’ll also encourage different departments to work together more efficiently. Collaboration can have far-reaching benefits for your business and your employees. Here are a few of them: 

• Higher—and more sustainable—productivity: When your people effectively communicate and collaborate, they’re actually more productive, as sharing ideas, resources, and expertise helps employees complete tasks more efficiently. That’s because instead of getting caught up on an issue or task, they know they can reach out to colleagues who can help them think of a unique solution or get over a productivity slump. They spend less time searching for information or duplicating work and more time actually hitting their KPIs.

• Enhanced creativity and innovation: According to Gartner research, knowledge workers who are intentional about how they work together are three times more likely to achieve high levels of innovation in their teams than those who don’t. Collaboration brings together diverse ideas and perspectives, helping foster more creativity and new ideas. 

• Better problem-solving and decision-making: When they work together effectively, combining their unique perspectives and experiences, your people are better equipped to solve problems and make decisions efficiently. Seventy-nine percent of workers in collaborative organizations feel prepared to tackle obstacles, which is four times more than employees in organizations where teamwork is less common. 

• Increased adaptability and agility: Around eight in ten employees at collaborative organizations feel well-equipped to adapt to emerging challenges. That’s because, in an organization that runs on teamwork, employees can bring together their strengths and knowledge to adapt strategies and processes to address issues as they arise, helping them make the most of opportunities. 

• Higher employee engagement and retention: Employees who give and receive support on projects at work are 65% more likely to stick around long enough to become more productive and profitable at their company. With 92% of employees at collaborative organizations feeling their work brings value to the business, teamwork fosters a sense of belonging and motivation among employees, making them more engaged and boosting retention. 

• Improved communication: Working together more cohesively will help your employees develop better communication skills, like active listening and feedback. This gives your people cleaner, more open lines of communication, both within a department and across teams. For example, by using a digital workspace like Switchboard, your people have multiple ways to communicate—even asynchronously—including audio, video, chat, and even visual communication tools like a whiteboard. This helps reduce misunderstandings and improve the flow of information. 

Use collaboration technology to work better together

The ‘House of the Future’ was designed to make its inhabitants’ lives easier and more comfortable, and many of the devices we use in our daily lives do just that. Similarly, the right tech stack can help your team collaborate better, bringing along benefits like more productivity, innovation, creativity, adaptability, and employee engagement. 

To make the most of AI and collaboration technology, your tech stack should include

• A choice of communication channels
• Project management software
• Analytics tools
• AI technology that helps with writing and proofreading

Most importantly, you need a workspace for improving team dynamics and making digital collaboration seamless. That’s where Switchboard can help. The digital workspace lets your team work together side-by-side, allowing everyone to scroll, type, and browse the same document at the same time. That means no screen sharing necessary, helping keep everyone engaged during and between meetings. 

By using the right tools, you’ll give your team more time back in their day to do what matters most–collaborating with one another to come up with creative, innovative solutions and designing something your customers will rave about. 

Want better team collaboration? There’s a tool for that.
Switchboard helps teams work better together with persistent meeting and project rooms that make everyone an active participant. 
Learn more