Introduction

Collaboration is a crucial part of business. It allows employees, clients, and partners to work together on projects and initiatives in real-time.

While there are many ways to collaborate with others, hybrid collaboration is one of the best ways to create an environment where people can easily communicate and share information online without having to leave their desks.

Video conferencing

Video conferencing is a great way to collaborate with your team in a hybrid work environment. It's easy to use, easy to integrate and allows you to have face-to-face meeting experiences from anywhere. A video conference can be as simple as you and a colleague talking about an upcoming project, or it can be more complex with multiple people involved in the conversation, simulating a conference room experience. When used effectively, video conferencing allows for effective communication with others across the globe from any device that has access to the internet.

There are many benefits of video conferencing, including:

  • Improved communication with remote teams and clients
  • Improved efficiency and productivity with fewer distractions
  • Ability to meet face-to-face from anywhere
  • Flexibility to schedule a meeting at a time that’s convenient for everyone involved
  • Ability to stay in touch with colleagues while traveling
  • Video conferences allows multiple members of your staff and clients to collaborate remotely

Virtual workspace

Virtual workspace tools are used to create, share and collaborate on documents. They also provide secure exchange of messages and files across devices. The use of a virtual workspaces is an effective way to manage multiple projects as well as keep track of important information. Once this is established, you can invite team members to participate in the workspace using their own devices.

Virtual workspaces provide a central location for all of your team’s critical information and allows you to share documents with other users, regardless of what device or software they use. It also provides an avenue for secure messaging and file sharing that is accessible from any location.

Security

Another significant concern in a hybrid work environment is security. Since you're likely to be working across multiple devices and with people who may not be located in your office, you'll want the ability to exchange messages and files securely. A good collaboration platform should offer secure exchange of messages and files across devices, as well as a secure connection no matter the device. This means two-factor authentication, encryption of all connections and data transfers, solutions for access control based on roles or permissions that are applied through policies or contracts for each individual user, encrypted storage on servers (in case a hacker gets into your account), etc. In addition, it's important that these platforms don't leave gaps between security at different levels: if one part is insecure then everything else becomes vulnerable too (e.g., email accounts).

Simplicity

The first step to improving collaboration in a hybrid environment is to make sure your tools are simple. You want something that your team can easily use across all devices, and integrates calls, messages, and meetings all in one place. The tool you choose should be easy to manage so that you don’t have to worry about tracking down people or manually logging calls or other interactions.

You want a solution that allows for scaling as well—this means it should allow users to grow at different rates without requiring them (or you!) to change strategies or methods of communication every time more people are added.

Hybrid collaboration

So how can you use UCaaS to improve collaboration in a hybrid environment?

Reduce barriers between on-premises and cloud workers by providing quick access to information through a single user interface. With unified communications, all aspects of your work environment (messaging, voice, video, and collaboration) are integrated into one seamless experience that works across devices and locations. This means your employees will have access to the tools they need wherever they are to stay connected with colleagues while getting more done faster.

Improve oversight over communication channels by centralizing all communication traffic into one place where it can be managed easily and monitored for compliance purposes (i.e., tracking who is communicating with whom). Unified communications delivers this kind of centralized control over what's being said as well as when it's being said. This way, managers can see who needs help completing their tasks quickly before assigning new projects based on workloads rather than just availability alone.

Conclusion

Collaboration is an important part of any business, and it’s more important than ever in today’s hybrid work environment. We hope these tips have helped you find new ways to collaborate with your team and clients. Keep in mind that whatever system you use to collaborate with others will likely change over time as your needs change, so don’t be afraid to experiment! If you have questions regarding collaboration tools and implementing them for your business, reach our to our team today here!