Using Collaboration Tools to Improve Knowledge Work

In many ways, we’re all becoming knowledge workers.

For example, let’s say you’re the manager of one of the many distribution or warehousing companies that have a presence in the Inland Empire. Many of these work sites are filled with computers for just-in-time product delivery, scanners, forklifts with onboard computers, and more.

Your employees are using these electronic tools to do their jobs more efficiently (automation) but also to gather something critical to your company’s success: data.

And what is data but information, information which gives you knowledge.

Which is why almost all employees in any business – pack and ship workers – are increasingly becoming knowledge workers.

Companies today need to allow workers more say in how they perform their jobs. The days of rote, do-this, then-do-that types of jobs are long gone. Today’s jobs are far more multifaceted and workers are required to make complex decisions. No longer are workers mere “cogs.” Neither are they performing mindless types of work, even on an assembly line.

Online collaboration tools can help in supporting your employees. Such tools can offer workers help in answers to questions they may have, improve communications between management and line workers and among departments, and more.

A January article in the Harvard Business Review discussed how a large insurance company is using an online social collaboration tool to help its workers in their day-to-day duties.  The tool allows anyone who works for the company to ask questions, make announcements, search the network to find answers, post comments, etc. The company found that when workers asked questions of community members, they often received answers more quickly than when they sought help via e-mail or from the help desk.

The company reported that its introduction of the online collaboration tool has been successful because, according to the article, “we made it OK to try something new.” The insurance firm also made it crystal clear that all conversations were public (internally) and set up and distributed well-defined and clear-cut “policies for compliance and governance.”

What about your company? Do you use tools (online or off-) to help your employees at all levels collaborate with each other? How has that worked for your firm?

Are you looking for a staffing partner, one who collaborates with your Riverside company so that you have the manpower you need at the time you need it? If so, contact Arrow Staffing. We’ve been helping Redlands, Riverside, and Ontario firms find great people for more than four decades and we’d love to help yours. Contact us today.

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