Email is a great communication tool enabling you to get in touch with business colleagues at the touch of a button. However, email isn’t a collaboration tool. Anyone who has tried to collate feedback from numerous colleagues on a document over email knows how painful the process can be. No one seems to remember which version the team is working on and there is always that one person who sends over some final amendments overnight. Hours can be wasted waiting for emails to go back and forth, searching through inboxes for missing documents.
Most companies rely on email as the primary means to share information among employees, despite the havoc it often creates. Email is a very limited tool and does a lot of things to silo work efforts, and a social business needs to employ more collaborative digital work tools well beyond email that are asynchronous, enabling a geographically disperse team to do great work together.
For businesses, social collaboration tools are used to make our working lives easier, but removing email from the workplace completely will require more than just introducing intuitive, easy-to-use tools in the office. It requires a change in habit. Email is deeply entrenched in our daily working lives and moving to other tools will require a culture shift. Any new tools and services need to be integrated into processes from the outset of the project or product development so that people become accustomed to using an alternative tool. And this is before you start the mammoth task of introducing client and partner companies to your amazing new tool.