Nobody likes to be micro-managed yet managers always want to know what employees are working and employees feel a lot of pressure to always have to justify where their time is going.  In larger size organizations especially, a lot of an employee’s time can be spent just looking for stuff.  I’ve spoken to a few employees at large organizations who experience tension between their teams because everyone always wants to know what everyone else is working on.  Another big challenge for employees is keeping their teams aligned which is crucial considering today’s modern distributed workforce.

These are two of the many areas where a collaboration platform can prove to be a most useful solution.  There are a few things employees can do to to keep their teams aligned and their bosses satisfied:

Narrate your work

Leverage the technology to not only share what you are working on but what you thinking about.  This allows your team to see where your thought process is taking you and allows them to comment and share their ideas and feedback.  Not only that but if your manager wants to know what you are working on they can simply take a look at your updates.  Problem solved.

Ask and answer questions

Finding people and information inside of many companies can be a very tedious task.  So why not rely on the collective intelligence of your organization to help you?  You can ask for documents you are looking for, advice on a project, or who you should be speaking with about a current engagement.  Answering questions also helps establish your presence within the organization as a leader, something which was not possible before.

Create groups

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to keep alignment within your team and organization is by creating groups where you can share all the relevant files and information with the right people.  Let’s say you are working on a particular client engagement or reside within a certain department within your company.  You can leverage groups to make sure that the right people are getting access to the right files at the right time.  No more emailing, no more going back and forth.  Everyone can see what is going on what everyone is working on and the beauty is that nobody needs to bug anybody else.  Perhaps one of the best benefits of this is the reduction in reliance on meetings.  If everyone can stay up to date on what’s happening then that means less meeting time.

Co-create content

Instead of sending emails back and forth with documents and revisions employees can co-author documents which means one document that everyone can create, edit, and comment on.  Collaboration platforms provide easy versioning and sharing controls to make sure that the right people are involved and reliance on email is dramatically reduced.

It’s in the best interest of employees to use collaboration platforms in their day-to-day jobs to help keep their teams aligned and their bosses at ease.  The next time your boss asks you “what did you do today?” you tell them to go check the collaboration environment where they can see everything you were working on.  Problem solved.

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