3 Tips to help you avoid collaboration app overload

Collaboration apps are crucial to modern teams, especially since many businesses have switched to flexible working arrangements. With these apps, team members can keep track of deadlines, share files, and communicate and collaborate with one another seamlessly from anywhere.

Most collaboration apps have become Swiss Army knives of productivity for organizations in virtually any industry, and their capabilities keep expanding over the years. However, it’s not uncommon for companies to utilize more than one of these at the same time to manage different branches, departments, or projects. Unfortunately, such a strategy — if not managed properly — can lead to a problem known as collaboration app overload.

What is collaboration app overload?

Collaboration app overload happens when employees become too busy juggling multiple collaboration platforms that they can no longer focus on their tasks, causing their productivity to dip. When this becomes a daily problem, employees may start to feel burnt out.

Moreover, collaboration app overload can lead to the creation of information silos. When different departments or teams are using different collaboration apps, the data shared within each app becomes siloed off from the others. This makes it difficult for employees to access the information they need, when they need it, disrupting workflows and productivity.

How can you avoid collaboration app overload?

The following tips can help you prevent collaboration app overload:

Evaluate what your business needs

Just because a collaboration app has impressive features doesn’t mean it’s the best one for your team. If the app doesn’t match your business’s requirements, you may end up turning to other software to compensate for its misgivings, resulting in collaboration app overload. Alternatively, your employees might use unvetted collaboration tools, leading to shadow IT and creating even more inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities for your company.

Before investing in a collaboration app, make sure you understand your business’s needs and your employees’ preferences. Ask for input from your IT department and the rest of your staff. Doing this will help you choose one or two tools that actually help your team get things done.

Audit the apps you’re currently using

Create a list of all the collaboration apps your company is currently using to identify any poignant trends and issues. For instance, each department in your organization may be using a different collaboration solution, even though these tools have similar and overlapping features. It could also be that some of the tools on the list are being underutilized or are no longer being used by your team.

Auditing your company’s collaboration apps gives you a better idea of which ones to let go of and which to keep. This will declutter your software ecosystem, making it easier for your employees to focus on their work instead of trying to figure out which collaboration app to use for a specific task.

Consolidate your company’s tools

Some of the top collaboration solutions on the market can do the work of several separate applications. Consider taking stock of your company’s tools and replacing those with the same capabilities as these feature-rich collaboration applications. Not only will doing so create a more focused software ecosystem and enable your employees to find the information they need more easily, but it can also help you save a lot of money.

Take Microsoft Teams, for instance. It has everything you need for both collaboration and communication, including chat, voice and video calls, file sharing, and even project management capabilities. Teams also supports external sharing, which is extremely handy for collaborating with Microsoft 365 subscribers outside your organization, such as clients and vendors. Additionally, it integrates seamlessly with other applications, both those created by Microsoft and by other developers.

To effectively prevent collaboration app overload, you need to really understand what your business needs. Seek your IT team’s help or turn to a managed IT services provider like [company_short]. Our IT experts will help you audit your organization’s requirements and the apps in your portfolio. We will also recommend the best collaboration apps that truly contribute to your business’s goals. Reach out to our IT specialists today to get started.