Collaboration is a great way for people to get things done, gain knowledge, and have fun together. When employees work with others in a group, they can easily solve difficult problems, share valuable learning, and coordinate their work. Face-to-face meetings are also great for group collaboration, but they also have problems.
Online collaboration can solve some of those problems and also provide some benefits that face-to-face meetings can’t.
The following are four main problems with face-to-face group collaboration:
1. Same place: All team members must meet in the same location, which can mean a slow, expensive and environmentally unsustainable journey.
2. Same time: All team members must meet at the same time. And scheduling a meeting to suit everyone is difficult in small groups and impossible in a large one.
3. No logs: Each person or a record taker should take notes on what was said.
4. Now or never: In a group meeting, you get a chance to voice your opinion, and sometimes that great idea takes a while to come.
How online collaboration overcomes these problems
1. Participate from anywhere: This may seem obvious, but it reflects the biggest effect the Internet has had on the world: lowering the cost of communication. Digital communications technology has made the world smaller. You can join meetings from any other location.
2. Participate at any time: Sometimes people read or post content at different times, which is possible through various online collaboration tools like email, Yahoo groups, etc. No programming required.
3. Create a file: With online collaboration, every meeting that takes place is automatically recorded, so there’s usually a durable archive that can be searched and explored. It is useful for preserving organizational knowledge.
4. Participate at your own pace:You don’t have to respond immediately with online collaboration. You can read the conversations at your own pace, and you can reply when you’re ready.
Online collaboration saves you a lot of time
The benefits of online collaboration stem from the fact that a file is created as the collaboration occurs. This allows people to participate, not at the exact moment, when they feel good. It means that they can listen carefully and think before responding. Plus, it gives them time to navigate through various discussions and choose the ones that interest them the most.
Online collaboration provides these opportunities that extend into the future. People can find the information you post at any time in the future in online groups, saving them time without any extra effort on your part.