Refresh Collaboration Strategy
Communities management
October 26th, 2022

It’s Time to Refresh Your Collaboration Strategy: Here’s How

by Grytics

Collaboration is still king.

Yet today’s hybrid, distributed workforces have changed the rules for collaboration. Many employees and leaders have moved out of the office, and now connect with each other over digital collaboration platforms and tools.

Companies have done a good job of embracing these changes and creating new digital collaboration strategies. Yet now is the time to re-examine and refresh those strategies to make sure they continue to deliver results.

We wrote this blog to help you do just that. To do so, we will explore:

  • Why now is the right time to refresh your strategy
  • How to refresh your strategy (and how to use data to do so)
  • How platforms like Grytics help you make the right changes

Let’s get started.

Why Now is the Time to Refresh Your Collaboration Strategy

There are a few reasons to refresh your collaboration strategy, starting today.

Think about it. You probably crafted a whole new collaboration strategy when the pandemic occurred, and you moved to a distributed or hybrid workforce.

You have likely followed this new collaboration strategy for the past two years. Which means at this point:

  • You’ve settled into what your long-term hybrid workforce will look like
  • You’ve gained a good understanding of what’s working, and what isn’t
  • You’ve generated hard data that can drive new strategic decisions
  • And — of course — right now everyone’s creating their plans and budgets for next year.

In sum: You have all the information you need to refresh your collaboration strategy, and doing so will fit into the overall company calendar.

Given all that, let’s explore a few proven practices to follow when refreshing your collaboration strategy, and how data can help you along the way.

How to Refresh Your Collaboration Strategy: Proven Practices

Remember — you only need to refresh your strategy; you don’t need to write a whole new strategy from scratch. Assuming you did a big overhaul 1 – 2 years ago in response to your new hybrid, distributed workforce, you will only need to make a few tweaks to keep it on track.

Here’s what that looks like at a high level.

  • Review your existing strategy and outcomes. Take a quick look at what you’ve been doing, and ask yourself “What have we achieved? Where have we dropped the ball? What do I know needs to change?”
  • Review your upcoming goals. Look at the targets you must hit over the year. Be honest with yourself about which you can hit with your existing strategy, and which you will miss without making changes.
  • Review your broader company strategy. Get a sense of what new company initiatives you will need to get your people on-board with, and line up with any changing requirements and resource allocations.

And, most important — Leverage data to make smart tactical changes. You no longer need to build your strategy based on “gut feel” alone. You can now use hard data to make objective, defensible adjustments.

For the rest of this article, we’ll look at how to do just that.

How to Use Data to Refresh Your Collaboration Strategy

To be clear — refreshing your strategy is both an art and a science, and you won’t always have hard data to drive your decisions. After all, in-person collaboration still exists, and that can’t be monitored or measured.

However, most of your workforce’s collaboration has moved onto digital platforms like Yammer, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace by Meta. These platforms automatically generate a substantial volume of data about how your workforce collaborates and can tell you objectively:

  • Which employees and teams are collaborating, and which aren’t.
  • Which of your leaders are collaborating, and which aren’t.
  • Which of your messages are well-received, and which are ignored.
  • And much more.

In short: You can use the data from your digital collaboration platforms to know — without a doubt — which elements of your existing collaboration strategy have worked and should be kept, and which need to be changed.

And platforms like Grytics make it easy to collect this data, analyze it, and turn it into actionable insights that guide your strategy refresh. Here’s how.

How to Refresh Your Collaboration Strategy Using Grytics

Grytics is a simple platform that pulls data from your digital collaboration tools, and makes it easy to organize, analyze, and pull insights from this data.

Grytics offers a few features that can help you make data-driven decisions about what to keep and what to refresh in your collaboration strategy:

  • Sentiment Analysis: Measure how your employees are feeling about their work and your company. Identify where you need to make changes to re-engage your workforce, and replicate the initiatives that your employees have responded positively to in the past.
  • Axes and Segments: Analyze collaboration at different levels of your company. Create an Axis to look at collaboration data for a large part of your workforce — like an entire division, or create Segments to analyze smaller units — like departments, locations, or even job titles.
  • Member Metrics: Identify which individual employees and leaders engage the most with your content — and each other — and who is sitting on the sidelines. Focus your strategy on leveraging your internal advocates, and encouraging your less engaged members to step up.
  • Content Metrics: Measure how your employees engage with your posted content. See what types of posts they interact with and which they ignore. Then, bake more of the high-engagement content into your strategy, and drop the content your employees don’t enjoy.

To learn more about how Grytics can help you refresh your strategy, click here to read about our platform or schedule a 1-on-1 consultation and demo.

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