The adage ‘two heads are better than one’ is just about always true. Enabling people to work well together is just smart business. Companies continue to put more productivity applications and collaboration tools at employees’ fingertips and to embrace flexible, modern work environments to support better ways of working. IDC’s 2023 State of Content Services Survey found that 58% of organizations invested in content sharing and collaboration tools in the past year, while 37% plan to invest in these areas over the next 12-18 months.
Yet if the tools meant to enable cooperation offer an additional repository for storing content or introduce new steps into existing workflows, they can cause teams and departments to work harder, not smarter. And business suffers as a result.
Digital friction not only hurts employee engagement, it can also negatively impact workplace productivity and the bottom line. According to Foundry Research, 82 percent of employees reported that technology-related challenges (such as complex workflows and data silos) caused department delays or missed deadlines and 58 percent reported lost business opportunities due to an inability to quickly access data.[1]
Let’s explore how workplace collaboration tools turn content, applications and workflows into a help, not a hindrance, removing friction to improve collaboration and the employee experience.
Content, content everywhere
The modern workplace is constantly evolving, aiming to empower employees and enable workplace productivity from anywhere. But productivity requires easy access to timely, relevant information—a tall ask when content resides across multiple applications and is fragmented and buried. In fact, the Foundry survey also revealed that complex workflows are the top inhibitor of employee engagement and productivity, cited by 46 percent of employees.
Struggling to find current information and the latest versions of key documents, employees can feel uninformed and ill-equipped to do their jobs and work effectively within teams. This often leads to disengaged and frustrated employees.
With engagement numbers already trending downwards in the U.S., falling from 48 to 44 percent from 2022 to 2023 according to Forrester[2], organizations need to make every effort to combat low engagement, providing workplace collaboration tools to make it easy to create, share and connect across departments, devices and distances.
Collaboration tools and the digital employee experience
So, how do organizations tame content chaos without inhibiting productivity and collaboration? What’s needed is an integrated approach, bringing together collaboration and enterprise information to create a smooth, unified employee experience.
OpenText™ Core for Google Workspace combines the seamless collaboration capabilities of Google Workspace with the powerful content management capabilities of OpenText™ Core, creating a smarter—and frictionless—way to work. Core provides the central hub to link Google Workspace with key enterprise applications that digital workers are using every day such as SAP®, Salesforce®, and Microsoft®. This embeds content management into collaborative workflows so that users always have access to the most current and relevant information while ensuring proper information management and governance.
As a result, organizations improve the availability and use of information across functional borders and lines of business, allowing teams to work smarter, not harder—and do more, together. As a case in point, let’s explore how Core for Google Workspace empowers smoother collaboration for sales teams.
Collaboration tools to improve sales and service operations
Without a true 360-degree view of customer information and seamless internal collaboration, businesses put customer relationships and new sales in jeopardy. With integrated workplace collaboration tools, companies make customer information readily available, ensuring teams, content, and business processes are in synch to shorten sales cycles and deliver customer satisfaction while improving workplace productivity.
Seamless collaboration removes the friction from sales and service processes. It also improves workplace productivity by helping employees ensure timely follow up and respond more quickly to customer needs, while keeping critical approval processes flowing to efficiently deliver quotes, RFPs, contracts, and more. As an example, employees can create RFP responses in Google Docs and Sheets, allowing procurement to review and provide input from within SAP, all while leveraging Google’s embedded search capabilities to instantly find content.
Empower teams in sales and beyond
Core for Google Workspace embeds content directly into business processes to help teams work smarter, not harder, in three key ways:
- Bring together collaboration and content for faster, smoother workflows: Enrich Google Workspace collaboration tools with by embedding content management and information governance, providing a 360-degree view of content and related processes in a single interface.
- Speed business processes: Embedding collaboration and content management into lead applications like SAP and Salesforce eliminates digital friction by delivering information in context and creating a single source of truth.
- Enhance security: Core for Google Workspace reduces risk by managing information end to end, and ensuring that organizational information governance, processes and reporting are transparent and defensible across the content lifecycle.
Discover how to empower teams to work smarter with OpenText Core for Google Workspace.
[1] Foundry Research, MarketPulse Survey: Digital Friction, September 2023
[2] Forrester, Predictions 2024: The Future of Work, 2023
