A recent
Harvard Business Review article talks about the need for people across hierarchies, functions and geographies within an organization to collaborate. Your employees should be empowered to submit their ideas and suggestions across the hierarchy. And your top management should be able to provide feedback and guidance to employees across verticals. Also, companies/teams within the same parent organization should be able to bridge differences in objectives and work together towards organizational goals.
Another aspect of collaboration required within an organization, is to tap knowledge and experience for process improvement in a large, global organization. The article suggests the need for online tools that can be employed to bridge these gaps and to enhance vertical, horizontal and global collaboration within the organization.
An Online Discussion forum can help you perfectly achieve all the above objectives. Here's how:
Process Improvement and Innovation
All your employees can participate in process improvement by suggesting ideas or reporting problems. Your Online Discussion forum can provide a variety of topics to post under. For example an employee can post a process improvement initiative or a new innovative idea under the 'Propose an idea' category.
Besides suggesting their own ideas or contributing by commenting on existing ideas, employees can also vote on ideas or on whether a particular comment contributes value to the idea.
Problem-Solving and Decision-Making
Knowledge and Expertise across various functions can be tapped for solving problems.
Discussion posts can be organized into categories, making it easier for employees to view or contribute to relevant discussions.
Employees should be able to follow, bookmark or email specific posts, so that they can easily collaborate across a geographically dispersed organization.
The look and feel of the discussion community should be customizable and brandable, making employees feel at home work irrespective of where they access the forum from.
At Zoho, we offer one such tool and have in fact, been using it extensively for encouraging collaboration within our own organization.
Zoho Discussions lets organizations create powerful internal communities which are fully customizable and come with a host of collaborative features. Apart from the above mentioned features, Zoho Discussions comes with a few more
integrated features that enable employees across teams to collaborate and contribute, thereby helping us constantly innovate around the products and services we create for you.
Another important community powered by Zoho Discussions, is our
Customer Support forum where customers can discuss Zoho products with our employees and with one another.
Your organization too can benefit in more ways than one, from a hosted forum service like Zoho Discussions. Watch
this video to learn more:
You're so right about how great ideas can come from anywhere. Recently Domino's Pizza was running and add for and new product that came right from a pizza cook in a random store. It was a huge success and now they have initiated a idea program that rewards the inventor.You never know where a great idea can come from and sometimes people who are really involved in the project can't "see the forest in count of the trees." Thanks for the blog!