Business teamwork is a game of two halves
It may not have escaped your notice that the FIFA World Cup tournament has started in Brazil this week. This is of course an excuse for every PR agency to come up with football related ways of promoting their products.
Business collaboration specialist Huddle has chosen to focus on the teamwork aspect which does at least have a relevance to its product. It helpfully points out that on the field players have to work together to achieve success and the same is true of the workplace.
Huddle’s CEO Alastair Mitchell says, "Collaboration is a team sport. It means many different things to different people, but collaboration essentially involves a group of individuals working together across boundaries to achieve a common goal. In today’s workplace, the network of people that an individual has to work with on a regular basis extends far beyond their own organization’s four walls and includes customers, partners and contractors. One of our customers, for example, works with more than 1,000 other companies in its Huddle workspaces. For people to get their jobs done effectively and be truly productive, all relevant parties have to be able to seamlessly work together on content regardless of where they are based or the devices they are using".
The serious point about this is the need to collaborate outside as well as inside the organization. Figures from Huddle's client base show that 85 percent of its customers use the service for external collaboration. And 47 percent use it to collaborate with more than five other companies.
This is backed up by recent Forrester research which shows that in a survey of almost 5,000 North American and European information workers 57 percent say they regularly collaborate and communicate with customers, colleagues or business partners. Only 12 percent work exclusively with their colleagues.
You’ll be over the moon -- or possibly sick as a parrot -- to find that all of this is summarized in the inevitably soccer-themed infographic below.
Image Credit: dotshock / Shutterstock
