3 Ways to Collaborate Efficiently And Globally While Cutting Travel Costs

Collaborating with people around the world and travelling from one continent to another to visit a customer is a common thing in todays’ business world. This way of international collaboration allows to bring different skills and mindsets together which can create real value add for your business. 

Looking at the flip side of it, travel costs become an increasing financial burden for companies. Modern applications for communication step right in here. Microsoft Skype for Business for example provides a range of smart features, which help employees to collaborate a lot more efficiently and make one or the other business trip unnecessary.

The thing is: some employees don’t even know about the capabilities Skype for Business offers. This is, why we want to introduce our 3 favorite features, which help to solve most of the collaboration issues without the need to take a plane or to drive for long hours for a one- hour-meeting.

It’s true. Some things need to be discussed face to face to lead to a productive outcome. Have you ever handed over someone a complex task and tried to explain on the phone what you want your colleague to do? And after 3 weeks you got the result back and recognized he got you totally wrong on the phone and a lot of working hours have been wasted? This can happen when you are not able to see the others persons’ body language during your explanation. A face to face conversation would have helped here.

Or you make use of the video conferencing feature of Skype for Business. This adds with only one click video to your call and you can see your colleague, which is 10,000 miles away from you, through your webcam in real time. So, next time when you see him frowning his face after you explained something to him during the video call, you know that there is more explanation needed.

Global collaboration comes inevitably with handling different time zones. Imagine, you are in Berlin and you are working on a project together with colleagues from Hong Kong, Mumbai and New York. Some of your team members also travel a lot around the world to visit customers. Reaching your team members in urgent situations can become a real challenge then.

The Status Alert of Skype for Business gives you real time information, if your colleague is available, busy, temporally away from his device, in a call or not in the office. Additionally, you can tag a colleague for a Status Change Alert, so you are notified immediately as soon as he is online and available for a call. This saves you a lot of time trying to call someone.

Some situations require fast actions. Did your customer request an offer and mention that he would need it in the next two hours? But you can’t prepare the offer document on your own because you need input from other colleagues?

With Skype for Business you can start a group call with the colleagues you need input from and share your desktop with the open document you need to work on. You can walk the others now through the document and work on different sections together. You can even give remote control of your desktop to the others, so they can make their own edits in the document. If you share this document via OneDrive with your team, coauthoring would be also possible. 

Skype for Business, as well as other applications of Microsoft Office 365, offer a lot more opportunities to make your day-to-day work and collaboration much more efficient.

Many companies and users are overwhelmed by the countless functions and opportunities the applications of Office 365 offer. With our Value Inspiration and Experience Workshop you will discover and experience the value that Office 365 provides for you personally and to your individual business needs.