Collaboration as a strategic approach to creating value is winning.  People are increasingly relying on a collaborative way of working; be it within a business or between businesses across industries.  This doesn’t mean that the work of promoting the practice and approach to collaboration should stop though.  As with every practice, so it is with collaboration; it needs improvement and innovation to deal with disruption and trends.  There is an increasing number of tools on the market that can help in default-setting for those who work collaboratively .  However the ongoing challenge is handling persistent suspicion and an even cynical attitude to collaboration borne out of a narrow vision of what collaboration means to business.  Thankfully, there is no shortage of good stories showing us how collaboration is helping businesses compete and thrive.  Some of these are selected for this month’s edition of recommended reading.

Communication Disruption: Rethinking Collaboration

The methods of communication have undergone more dramatic changes in the last five years than in the one hundred years following Alexander Graham Bell’s great invention. Many exciting changes are causing major disruption in how businesses adopt communication. RSI has always believed that communication is the lifeline of your business and remains committed to helping managers with complex ecosystems…READ ON

Digital Transfor-What? It’s Time We Simplify the Language of Employee Collaboration

We’re only a few months into 2018, but I’m calling an audible on how we talk about the employee communication and collaboration space. “Digital Transformation” and its associated lingo have crossed the line into buzzword territory.

Our industry has created an echo-chamber where we wax poetic about social ROI, being “cultural change agents,” the employee experience, talent analytics and multi-step collaboration maturity models. We use this terminology to educate CxOs about the value of employee communities and collaboration platforms. We build PowerPoint decks with complex workflow diagrams to help explain our blatant abuse of syllables and statistics found in an analyst report…READ ON

Team Collaboration Apps for Your Small Business

Proper collaboration is crucial to success and productivity – regardless of whether you’re hoping to win an athletic competition or achieve success for your small business. Everyone in a team needs to have the right tools to work cohesively together to solve a problem, respond to the results, and optimise in the future.

In an environment where teams are becoming increasingly dispersed, thanks to the rise of remote and flexible working, collaboration tools are a necessary part of connecting…READ ON

As Your Teams Start Working Remotely, Online Collaboration Becomes Crucial

Advances in cloud-based business solutions continue to accelerate, and these solutions are incredibly beneficial to companies that have remote workers or offices across the country and the globe. Cloud solutions make it far easier to manage collaboration and document control, no matter if it’s a memo, spreadsheet or managing data .

Some of most exciting advances have taken place in the forms space. While forms don’t get the fanfare they deserve, forms serve as the primary collection point for data. Imagine if no one could join your mailing list, submit a resume, or update their healthcare insurance information, nearly all companies would grind to a halt if forms suddenly disappeared.

Moving your forms online is not the daunting task it once was. Advances in web technology has taken what once was the domain of sophisticated programmers and software engineers and placed it squarely in the hands of everyone…READ ON

Regional collaboration is key to unlocking a resilient and sustainable region, concludes Asia-Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development

The fifth Asia-Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development (APFSD) closed at the UN Conference Centre in Bangkok today with a call for greater regional collaboration to tackle the challenges of building a more resilient and sustainable region.

Organized by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) from 28 to 30 March, APFSD served as a platform for over 750 representatives from 53 Member States to share their achievements, challenges and the opportunities arising from the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development under the theme ‘Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies.’

In a video message to the forum, UN Deputy-Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed said, “One key challenge for the countries of Asia the Pacific is how to pursue a more integrated approach to development…READ ON

A Brilliant Sign That Your IQ Is High

Intelligent people are better at cooperating with others, new research finds.

While personality traits like being generous and conscientious have an effect on cooperation, higher IQ is the main factor that encourages people to work well together…READ ON

Humanities and science collaboration isn’t well understood, but letting off STEAM is not the answer

Debates about the need for the humanities and sciences to work together suffer from repetition compulsion. Too frequently, those writing on the subject immediately turn to the work of chemist and novelist C.P. Snow on the “two cultures” – a lecture that was written nearly 60 years ago. Since then, there have been many examples of researchers in universities doing precisely the collaboration that Snow thought did not exist.

Recently, Ryerson university associate professor Richard Lachman wrote that he wanted to put the arts into the sciences, the STEAM into STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths). Lachman suggested that the humanities should merely help the sciences to understand the implications of their work. All he achieved in calling for this…READ ON