With Zoom, Teams, Slack, emails, meetings, phone calls, and more, there are more ways than ever to stay connected to your team. But less is more. No one can keep up with information that is flying at you from platform after platform, conversations that start in a call, continue in an email and end with a WhatsApp.

Now more than ever with the rise of remote working, organisations need structured collaboration, clarity in where individuals can find information, and broad engagement across important projects for your business. Here are four ways to find some much needed coherence in your team's operations and improve the way things happen for your organisation.

1. Confirm your information hubs. Whether your team are looking up timelines, attaching files, poring through old documents, or adding a comment to a colleague's piece of work, they need to know where to look. Decide what functionality you particularly need, explore different portals, and get your whole team onboarded with a clear understanding of how document management works for you.

2. Provide clarity in where and how to communicate. If someone drops you a WhatsApp message one evening with "I've sent that email to the food supplier", it might be useful at the time, but what about the next day? What if you got other messages that evening on different subjects via Teams and Gmail? Is there then a place to go where you have to officially mark the tasks as complete? It quickly becomes a pain to manage different streams of communication.

3. Actively encourage collaboration. Whether you're planning an event, managing a venue or running an organisation, you're going to be overseeing some complex projects involving multiple departments at once. Open up lines of communication, introduce department leads, and encourage collaboration from the very top. The more cross-departmental your projects are, the more relevant and valuable contributions you'll get - and the more affected parties will actually know how they are affected.

4. Set out unified causes. Your team will work together and work harder if they believe in what they are working towards and the people they are working for and with. There's no simple way to achieve this level of cohesion but be clear about what you need from your team, and be clear about the results they will achieve if they work collaboratively. Make sure your whole organisation feels like a team with clearly aligned targets.

How governance software can bring all this together

Collaboration affects the whole world, from a primary school group project to doing your Christmas shopping to running an organisation the size of Microsoft, so we haven't mentioned WeTrack (or our industry) until now. But it is an area in which we can help your organisation. WeTrack is an online hub for your project management, event delivery or general governance, acting as a single source of truth for our clients to manage projects and plans. We've had one client operate so that if a piece of information isn't in WeTrack, then that information doesn't exist! The attitudes of collaboration and engagement that WeTrack encourages gives you the confidence that your operations are as efficient as they can be. That's all we'll say on that here, so get in touch to learn more.

Bottom line: collaborative operations lead to greater efficiency, happier team members and better results!

If you want to learn more about making gains across your organisation, explore our white paper on how event operators, venue managers and other professionals can use software to save costs.