Team Talk Collaboration
Team Talk versus emails? …….. no contest.
Team Talk empowers employees to focus and be more productive by enabling them to collaborate privately with other Team Members without the distracting noise of daily email clutter or spam.
How information is handled via email versus the Team Talk collaboration platform
The typical corporate user spends over 2 hours a day reading and responding to email and it typically takes 10-15 minutes to refocus on a project following an email. Is that time well spent?
The major issue with email is that information is force fed to you. If someone has your email address and wants to send you information then there really is not much you can do about it – especially in the context of management and colleagues. Email is pretty the much the equivalent of broadcast advertising for many employees – generally intrusive, and not necessarily paid attention to. But the issue of being force fed information is very real and sometimes useful depending on the source.
For example, if corporate marketing wants to send out a company newsletter, hopefully you’re going to get it in your inbox and read it. This is highly probable for people using a PC or laptop, but if you’re receiving it on a mobile phone, chances of reading it are a lot lower as unfortunately, email on mobile is becoming less like email and more like a quick messaging service.
But what happens:
If a colleague or co-worker has a question … you get more email
If you’re invited to a meeting … you get more email
If someone wants to assign a task to you …more email
If someone needs to share a document with you …more email
If someone on your team is responding to a group email you’re also going to get an email
If revisions or comments are being made to a document or other piece of information … more email
It’s easy to see why inboxes get flooded, and this is just from colleagues sending stuff. You also get plenty of emails from customers, spam emails, and personal emails.
And remember that just because an email is sent – does not mean it is going to get read or acted upon!
In a recent study, researchers found that; people send and receive on average 15 emails with attachments each day; and 59% of managers miss valuable information every day, simply because they can’t find it or never see it in the first place.
Where is the worthwhile information you need to do your job? It’s probably lost in a morass of other stuff – unstructured and not easy to find, analyze or aggregate together.
What about Team Talk?
Team Talk does not send notifications for every action, every activity, and every comment that someone creates. Instead, all you have to do is access the projects you have been invited to (which appear automatically in your project list if you’re part of the team); as all related project notes, discussions, comments, reports, knowledge and information are kept in one secure place.
The whole purpose of the Team Talk collaboration platform is that it is linked and tightly coupled directly to the business processes you are involved with, so it helps manage relevant information flow much more effectively.
Think of the simple social network capabilities that are standard today, “being invited to join” or “following” someone as you are a friend. Now imagine being able to extend that type of functionality not just to people but to active projects; including information, notes, reports, documents, tasks, groups, and anything else that you need to get your job done more effectively and efficiently. Add to that the ability to follow specific topics or tags and you have an effective structured filtering and notification system.
And if you are an originating broker, you can invite your team members and build up a team for a particular project; from junior employees, co-workers, managers, directors, and even the CEO and your clients. Once they’ve joined the team, you can filter their view of the project so they only have access rights for what they need to see and contribute to do their job effectively; and you can simply enable, modify and disable their access rights if the Team dynamics change throughout the life of the project.
You can also control the privacy of notes, discussions and reports by changing Privacy settings; Private, Public and even Password Protected (for secret, 1-to-1 or smaller private closed group access activities).
As an employee, you can request and control the information you receive so that it is relevant to you. So for example, if you’re in the property practice you might only be interested in or limited to what is happening with your immediate colleagues and the projects in that department. But, you could also request to follow projects or information that comes from any other department or geography. Every individual can request what it is they want and if approved, get information around their work and projects.
As a Regional Head or Practice Manager, you can get access and discuss with all your brokers and see a full aggregate view of your business. And as a CEO, get the relevant business analytical view of all Projects across your whole enterprise instantly, and in real time!
No need to ask somebody else in the organization to generate a report.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Collaboration platforms like this also help with many of the other issues that email cannot. For example finding subject matter experts or getting the absolute latest version of a report. The Team Talk Collaboration platforms empower employees to be more self-sufficient without having to rely on email for everything. And you get simple, straightforward notes & conversations directly about your work.