Simplify employee induction with online collaboration

Filed under: Core — Sean Kelly @ 8:22 am

Employees come and go. And whilst some companies have higher employee turnover rate than others, in most cases, companies go through employee inductions fairly regularly.

When a new employee joins a company, they literally start from scratch, going through a steep learning curve to understand the business policies, processes and methodologies – as well as their new role. In larger companies, the Human Resource manager tends to be the one responsible for taking the employee through this process. In smaller companies, this role is typically played by the employee’s direct supervisor.

Given that they will not be aware of the organisational hierarchy, roles and responsibilities of other members, the new employee first needs to be introduced to the team. In the second stage of their induction, they are introduced to their responsibilities and their tasks. The third and final stage of induction involves inducting the new employee to the company’s administration – eg. codes of conduct, rules and policies. The entire induction process can last up to a month.

Generally, new employees are inducted into their roles through many meetings, briefings, and training sessions. We all know meetings are most effective, but we need to take into consideration the time taken for the supervisor / HR manager to prepare for each of these meetings and to document post-meeting tasks.

The supervisor or HR manager also has the responsibility of sending multiple documents for multiple purposes – policies, role and tasks. In addition to these, they will probably need to send the new employee past email streams related to each task to give them a sense of progress made and the current status. The person in charge of the induction therefore wastes a significant chunk of his / her time every day looking through old documents and folders to send the most relevant ones across.

We all know that every employee has a significant amount of unproductive time before they get up and running, and generally businesses are comfortable with this. But what’s surprising is the amount of time the supervisor / HR manager spends to induct an employee. Surely, there has to be a better way to manage it?!

If you asked this question in the recent past, the answer was probably, ‘No’. But today, a range of programs and applications that enable an easy task handover process. These are called collaboration applications.

Generally, collaboration applications bring together the right people to discuss a certain topic. Using a collaboration application, you are able to send messages, attach large files, and assign tasks. Not only does this make the induction process easier for the supervisor/ HR manager, it also enables the new employee to see everything in one place.

But to make it even easier, there is another collaboration application – CORUS – that takes it to the next level. On CORUS, every message, reply, document, link, image is saved within a topic. This means you don’t have to waste time looking for a document in order to attach it to an email.

All you have to do is add the new employee on CORUS and assign the task to them. And instantly they will be able to see the messages that were sent, the due date that was set for the task and download the files that were exchanged. And all you’re left with is the initial briefing.

With CORUS, you cut induction from a winding three-step process to a simple one-step process. Doesn’t that make staff induction a million times easier?




Manage work – not just projects or tasks – through online collaboration

Filed under: Core — Tags: , — Sean Kelly @ 2:37 pm

A fashionable buzzword in the corporate world is ‘work management’. More and more people are starting to question the comprehensiveness of the terms project management and task management, and suggest that work management is the umbrella that contains the other two. Before we get into work management, however, let’s think about project management and task management.

In project management, the project is inevitably at the core. Each and every discussion, meeting, and deadline revolves around the project. And within each project, you manage tasks. Whether you delegate or assign them to yourself, you have deadlines and a million other things that revolve around your tasks.

With work management, you manage everything – the project, the tasks and the deadlines – together. Most do this via email and various documents. And, of course, managing both projects and tasks also involves countless meetings – for planning, briefings and review.

Meetings are beneficial, because it’s via that interaction that you get real-time engagement from the stakeholders involved. However, before every meeting (whether at your office or online) you spend time preparing; collating notes, locating documents, and so on. If you multiply that time by the number of meetings you hold to manage your collective work, it’s highly possible that you’re spending an entire day – if not more – every month just preparing for meetings. Crazy, right?

In a typical work environment, we manage all kinds of things – documents, images, spreadsheets, presentations, calendar appointments. These are usually sorted into folders – probably by client, project or task. Many of us think this is the only way to organise these items. But then, inevitably, we all find ourselves wasting time looking for a file on a server, going through a seemingly endless list of folders in a multi-level folder hierarchy. So while sorting documents into folders on your server seems logical, you end up spending way too much time trying to find that document that you urgently need. With the advent of cloud technology, we now have the ability to store our documents in the cloud with applications like DropBox. But the trouble with these applications is that you still have to sort them into folders.

What we really need is an infrastructure that can help us sort through documents, tasks, links and calendar events by topic. This is where collaboration applications really come into their own. Within the context of work management, collaboration applications are invaluable because – by their very nature – they bring projects, tasks, documents, calendar events, and stakeholders together in one place. Topics enable you to outline the tasks associated with a project, send the relevant briefing document, assign tasks to owners, exchange information, collaborate, and monitor progress – all through a single application, where everything is saved on the cloud.

CORUS is one such application. Not only does it do everything that a typical collaboration application does, it also lets you sort everything by topic. A topic can be a project, a specific task, or general work management. And within each topic, you can sort messages and tasks by tagging them. Tags can be anything from priority levels, scale of urgency, or you can create your own custom tags to sort information as you wish.

This means that instead of having to search through a 7-level hierarchy of folders to find a file, with CORUS you simply go to your topic, and then drill down via the tags you’ve created. And this makes the end-to-end process of work management far more efficient.




Scoping change through enterprise collaboration

Filed under: Core — Tags: — Sean Kelly @ 8:44 am

All businesses go through some kind of change in their lifespan. And so, change management is essential in every business. Since every big change begins with scoping, you need to do it diligently.

Scoping involves three key stages – research, planning and review. The research stage is usually assigned to various team members to complete when their schedules allow. Planning and review, however, are more complex and require in-depth discussions so that key stakeholders can come to collective decisions along the way.

Decisions may range from trivial (eg. when to have a meeting) to important (eg. assigning tasks to the right people, or allocating a budget). Regardless of the scale of the decision, key stakeholders need to be across all the various discussions in order to scope the change effectively.

With multiple decisions (trivial and important) that need to be made, current change management projects involve many, many meetings. Meetings allow key stakeholders to get together face to face, have productive discussions and then make an informed (and collective) decision.

But meetings can be productivity sinks.

Whilst they facilitate engaging discussions and quick decision making, they come at a cost. Often, meetings to discuss complex subjects take hours to prepare – think about the time taken to set up a meeting, gather notes from the team, consolidate the notes and then circulate them.

If we think about meetings in the context of scoping and consider the amount of tasks to be discussed and decisions to be made, spending many hours preparing for meetings counters the purpose of having the meeting – which is to be productive. And so more often than not, scoping for change becomes a painful process.

Complicating this is the increasing mobility of the workforce. As more and more companies consist of teams in separate locations, the cost of bringing everyone together in one room is costly.

Thankfully, there are a number of new online applications that are making collaboration easier and cheaper. Specifically, collaboration applications (once installed and populated with the right users) allow you to bring your key stakeholders together in one, virtual place. This enables your team to discuss tasks, make decisions and monitor progress – generating the same result you’d get in a face-to-face meeting but without the associated costs.

CORUS is an enterprise collaboration application, and was built to enable the management of everything from admin to clients to projects (change management is only one example). It allows you to create topics and projects, gather your stakeholders, create tasks, assign owners and share information in one place.

If we refer back to change management, and scoping specifically, CORUS allows you to:

  1. Get decisions from your stakeholders without requiring them to be in the same room;
  2. Stop spending time collating information before meetings (as CORUS shows all previous conversations and discussions within a topic); and
  3. Generally, speed up the scoping process.

Most importantly, CORUS is a cloud application. This means stakeholders all over the world can collaborate anywhere they can access a web browser.




Engage your customers with online collaboration

Filed under: Core — Tags: — Sean Kelly @ 11:45 am

Customers are core to every business. In fact, they’re the reason you and I are even in business. With the intensity of competition nowadays, we always have to strive to be better for our customers. Specifically, we need to provide better services and develop better products.

But, most importantly, we need to keep ourselves positioned in their minds.

To do this, we need to keep them engaged, keep them in the loop. Businesses try to achieve this in a number of ways – newsletters, announcement emails and offers.

Whilst these methods may provide a means of staying in touch, they’re mostly one way and don’t encourage an engaging dialogue. To truly engage your customers, you need to engage them around the work you’re completing for them.

How do you do that?

We think collaboration applications are the answer – tools that can help you and your team collaborate on projects. By involving your customers in this collaboration too, they become engaged in the conversation and invested in the outcome.

CORUS is an online collaboration application that brings you, your team and your customers to a single place where they can discuss topics, send messages, exchange files, assign tasks and organise events.  With Corus, you’re able to keep your customers engaged and your business front of mind.




Achieve greater productivity through online collaboration

Filed under: Core — Tags: — Sean Kelly @ 9:01 am

In a recent article, I read that the global Gross Domestic Product has doubled in the past decade alone. As economic output is a function of productivity, has the world has become twice as productive in the past 10 years?

We know you can increase productivity in the online world with tools such as email, laptops, and smart phones that have enabled mobile communication. But these tools are just the beginning.There are newer technologies and more importantly newer practices, that will lead to even greater productivity – namely, collaboration applications.

Some people believe that these new tools will only mean more work, they are wrong.

Collaboration applications were built to facilitate productivity via team work. Essentially, a good collaboration application generates collective productivity which is more valuable than individual productivity.

CORUS is an online collaboration application that brings together people around a certain topic where they can discuss, send messages, share files, assign tasks and organise events. It also brings the right people – authorities and executers – to one place. With CORUS, you can be more efficient and therefore, more productive.




Online communication etiquette

Filed under: Core — Sean Kelly @ 10:09 am

Communication has always involved certain written and unwritten rules. With face-to-face communication, the importance of turning up and contributing goes without saying. And with phone communication, staying focused on the conversation (rather than, say, browsing the internet) is basic manners. Essentially, when it comes to the etiquette of communication, engagement is key. And this is true for online communication as well.

Increasingly, business leaders are trying to achieve engagement with their staff. But it’s not easy, as engagement is not merely getting together to share opinions or participate in discussions once in a while. It requires your team to participate in an ongoing dialogue.

So, how can you achieve it?

Put simply – you facilitate the communication process so that people in your team can easily communicate, share files, share opinions, and create discussions. By easing the communication process, you enable people to engage. Recently, a number of software and web applications have emerged for this purpose – they are known as collaboration applications.

But you can’t just use any collaboration application; you need a collaboration application that is easily accessible, simple and user-friendly. CORUS not only lets you discuss and share files so that you are always connected, but is accessible on any browser and on any device. CORUS was built to help you achieve true engagement.




Integrate messages and files with online collaboration

Filed under: Core — Tags: — Sean Kelly @ 9:40 am

In business, our world generally revolves around files – the lifeblood of most organisations. As more people jump on the online bandwagon, file transfer has become one of the most common online activities.

For many years, email has been the most-frequently used medium for file transfer. It’s convenient, direct and private; and allows people to send word documents, images, spreadsheets and presentations.

But what about large files like videos and high resolution images? Most email systems limit the size of attachments allowed. People have managed to work around this using other options like USB sticks, CDs and memory cards. But these aren’t so useful now that we’re becoming a more mobile world.

Lately, we’ve seen the emergence of file-sharing applications hosted in the cloud, like DropBox and YouSendIt. While these applications solve the problem of sending large files, they are standalone applications that don’t provide integration between the message and the file (like email does).

So, what’s the solution?

A cloud-hosted, online collaboration application that combines email with file-sharing.

CORUS takes it one step further and integrates messages and files with topics, tasks and calendar events. It’s an online application that allows access from any web browser and from any device. And it keeps confidential items private. CORUS was built with the principles of seamless online collaboration in mind.




Online collaboration – collaborate on your travels

Filed under: Core — Sean Kelly @ 9:33 am

Companies have evolved the way they work, and individuals now need the ability to collaborate with other stakeholders whilst on the road or travelling overseas.

In response to this need, virtual collaboration applications were born. These applications bring your team to a central online space, where discussions can be held and files exchanged.

The issue with these applications is that, more often than not, they require a piece of software to be installed on your particular device. This means that in order to collaborate you must have your own device handy, which essentially defeats the whole purpose of mobile collaboration.

To make collaboration truly mobile, you need an application that lets you access everything – your messages, files, tasks, calendar – anywhere via a web browser.

CORUS is exactly that. It is an application for online collaboration that is hosted in the cloud, and is accessible anywhere via the web. This means you don’t need your own device, and can instead jump on any computer (in an internet cafe, at the airport etc) or smart phone, and immediately collaborate. Collaborating while travelling just got a whole lot easier.




Online collaboration for mobile convenience

Filed under: Core — Sean Kelly @ 9:53 am

Evolution is not just something that occurs with humans. In the past two decades, we have seen the evolution of devices; having progressed from landlines to pagers to mobile phones and, now, smart phones.

As with devices, the way we communicate has also evolved. We are no longer restricted to a desk or an office in order to collaborate effectively.

The same applies to files. Where previously we needed to be in an office to access files (some of us still do), many of us now have the technology to access files remotely while we’re on the go.

Devices have been improved to support this mobility, which allows for easier collaboration.

While this is convenient, it only goes so far. On a smart phone, you may be able to access files stored in your email inbox. But what about files that are not in your inbox, but rather on a physical server?

This is where cloud collaboration comes in. With a cloud collaboration application, you can send and access files from any device that is synced to your server.

CORUS takes cloud collaboration one step further, by being an online application that can be accessed via any device through any web browser. Simply put, Corus enables convenient, truly mobile collaboration.




Low provisioning cost means better collaboration

Filed under: Core — Sean Kelly @ 9:45 am

In this day and age, we enjoy a never-ending supply of technology. Where previously it was a privilege to own a mobile phone, it is now a staple.

As people get more devices and better technology at their fingertips, they use more applications. And, with the recent movement to the cloud, applications are now running without the need for a physical server. As a result, the cost to manage an application is significantly lower than what it was just a decade ago.

This lower management cost has seen a recent jump in the number of tools that enable online collaboration.

This means there is a plethora of choice, and it is up to us to choose the tool that enables us collaborate most efficiently.

An application hosted in the cloud, CORUS is designed for efficient online collaboration. Files, messages, tasks and calendar appointments are all saved on an application that is accessible through a web browser. With CORUS, collaboration is simpler, cheaper and more efficient.




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