Collaboration is an incredibly important part of helping your team function at peak efficiency. For many teams, however, virtual collaboration can become incredibly difficult. Fortunately, tools like BlueJeans can help you eliminate those obstacles and bring your team together more effectively.
Common challenges of virtual collaboration
Virtual collaboration can bring with it a number of advantages, including the ability to bring your team together from anywhere, at any time. Unfortunately, it also brings with it a number of common difficulties.
- Team members may struggle more with communication
- Virtual tools don't always entirely replace face-to-face communications, which means that team members may not connect as well when they collaborate virtually as they would when they came together in person.
- It can prove more difficult to establish who has responsibility for what element of a project
- Delegation can prove more challenging, especially if team members aren't sure who is supposed to take on certain elements of a project or who they should go to with questions.
- Virtual teams may have a harder time maintaining focus. Virtual team members may not be sure what they need to remain focused on, or they may not feel as though they have to maintain the same high standard of accountability that they had to hold to in the office.
- Virtual collaboration makes it more difficult to tell what each team member brings to the table
- Depending on the platform you use and how it organizes your work, virtual platforms can make it much more difficult to establish who has completed which part of a project, which can make it more difficult to gauge the individual contributions of each team member.
- Employees may feel, in general, more disconnected from the other members of their team, from management to other team members
- Virtual collaboration often feels as though it places a barrier between the two parties. Instead of communicating directly, many people may struggle to keep up with how a project is progressing.
- Team members who aren't part of a direct conversation may feel more out of the loop and uninvolved, which can leave them struggling with a general sense of disengagement at work--and lead to the corresponding drop in productivity.
The best virtual collaboration tools
Using the right virtual collaboration tools can go a long way toward easing many of the challenges that team members may face during the virtual collaboration process. BlueJeans helps team members connect directly, through a platform that allows them to come as close to "face to face" as it's possible to be without actually meeting in person. Virtual collaboration software options can help track the contributions of each team member and rate engagement in a highly effective way, making it easier to determine what each team member is bringing to the table and how it might be helping.
Furthermore, BlueJeans is designed to help keep your team more connected even when they have to be apart. Not only can you help improve their overall collaboration efforts through connected rooms that make it easy to join and simple to manage, you can bring team members together for virtual get-togethers, conference sessions, and events that are expressly designed to help build that vital sense of team connection.
Try BlueJeans today
If you're looking for a better virtual collaboration option, try BlueJeans today. Our platform can help you bring your team members together, enhance their ability to collaborate, and track their contributions so that you can see what each member is able to accomplish and how they fit into the team as a whole, all while enhancing team-building opportunities.
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