Social Collaboration refers to the workflows that encourage interaction and cooperation among employees. It is the process in which groups, departments or multiple people interact with each other in order to achieve a particular goal; one of the main advantages of social collaboration is that it removes geographical boundaries.

At a basic level, social collaboration happens when people work together as a team on a particular project; an example of a social collaboration tool is Monday.com, which allows people from different geographical areas to work on a number of projects.

This is particularly important where employees are separated by department or across different geographic sites.

Benefits of social collaboration

1. An improved organizational culture

When employees work on various projects and support each other, there is a lesser chance of failure between them, and this is because each project eventually becomes a team project. Combining a culture of openness and honesty, employers are able to encourage employees to be transparent about the things they know and don't know.

This surely creates a great culture of upskilling and collaboration, in which employees are eager to acquire new skills and learn new concepts.

2. Knowledge transfer 

Employees regularly encounter challenges during their day to day work that they might not be able to solve immediately. And sometimes, they might not even know who to ask management. 

For instance, your customer service team may be using a reporting tool for the first time that the marketing team has already been using for the last three months. By encouraging someone from the sales team to help guide the customer service team with the new tool and resolve all their queries, it’s possible to drastically decrease the learning curve. 

Your organization could also create  a communication channel in which teams can post their questions and queries, and employees working across the organization can respond. Examples of such include: Slack, Google Chat and Microsoft Teams.

Why is social collaboration important?

Due to the pandemic, most organizations  now have more remote employees than before. While employers are working with their employees to ensure that employees do not feel isolated from the others, due to a lack of face to face communication, it’s still difficult for employees to know what is happening within the organization outside of their team. 

Social collaboration, therefore, helps employees feel connected to the rest of the organization by giving them a clear idea about what projects the other teams are working on even when they are not working from the same physical office space.