How to Boost Collaboration, Productivity and Efficiency Across Multiple Departments — with One Platform
Workplace collaboration has always been key to business success, but it’s become even more so as remote, asynchronous and hybrid working patterns have skyrocketed over the past few years.
Often, clients come to us because they’ve reached a breakpoint: the tools they’re using and the processes they have in place aren’t enabling them to work as collaboratively, productively and efficiently as they’d like. They’re seeing lead times, sales volumes, internal performance tracking and customer satisfaction suffer as a result — and they’re ready to turn things around.
Here, we’ll explore the relationship between collaboration, productivity and efficiency, best practices for implementing management software, and how the right platform can prime your business to boost results across the board.
From collaboration, productivity and efficiency follow
To ground ourselves in how collaboration, productivity and efficiency interlink, let’s explore two potential workplace scenarios.
Scenario A: Business operations have outgrown your collaboration methods; cracks appear
Colleagues across your different buildings and time zones are struggling to track, update, access and verify data in Excel, Google Sheets, and so on.
They can’t enter documents simultaneously, often finding they’ve been basing actions on obsolete information or have lost updates and access rights. Overall, delays, inefficiencies and frustrations are high.
Scenario B: You adopt software that simultaneously aligns and autonomises your teams
Your employees are all remotely accessing the latest data and insights from their various locations. On a single, updated platform, each via a user-friendly, intuitive and vibrant dashboard view that’s tailored to their specific needs.
With consistent access and live information updates from their simultaneous, synced edits, decisions are faster and more informed, company-wide. Fewer opportunities are lost and employees experience a happier, more collaborative working environment.
The leap from Scenario A to Scenario B is what our Provident CRM team strives to help our clients achieve, through both intelligent management tool roll-out and identifying the collaboration-enhancing software best suited to their business needs.
Best practices for implementing management tools
Customisation to suit your company needs
Designed to be accessible and intuitive, leading management tools are quick to set up and include myriad templates to get you started. Putting this task on one of your employee’s already-full plates, however, is often a recipe for your tool roll-out becoming protracted and overwhelming, falling short of the results it should deliver both for that initiator employee and your business at large.
To resolve this, the Provident CRM team happily takes customisation and implementation off your hands. Immersing ourselves in your as-is circumstances, documentation, processes, blockages, frustrations and aspirations, we craft the dashboards, integrations and automations you need, iteratively reviewing and refining with you until they’re the ideal fit.
Thorough, employee-first onboarding
Of course, it’s natural to experience some pushback when new management software is introduced — especially if it seems to give employees’ higher-ups insights into their day-to-day output metrics.
At Provident CRM, we like to work from a bottom-up implementation perspective, ensuring employees truly feel that productivity-boosting software is arriving to make their daily work easier and that they’re at ease with the setup. Facilitating employees to perform at their collaborative best through tailored dashboards then, in turn, generates the high-level reporting needed at management level, without this feeling like an invasive imposition.
Introducing monday.com: How can the right software boost your collaboration, productivity and efficiency?
1. Streamline business processes to build a customer-centric organisation
The majority of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are excellent at helping with sales, tracking and nurturing leads, opportunities and deal-closing. But what happens next?
One of monday.com’s stand-out aspects is its ability to house tasks throughout the customer experience chain, from marketing and sales through to project and physical delivery, invoicing and post-sale customer service. Removing department siloes with a single, accessible and up-to-date system for better-defined processes and seamless handovers between your teams.
In fact, 80% of Provident CRM clients who implemented monday.com have since expanded the platform to include other teams in their company, as its collaboration-boosting effect naturally spread.
2. Gain back busywork time to boost efficiency
We frequently hear from clients who’ve implemented monday.com with us that they’re leveraging the software to replace multiple internal meetings. The days of gathering a group to nod along as the meeting lead walks them all through a shared spreadsheet are no more. Instead, everyone simply adds real-time updates, queries and needs in dedicated dashboard items, saving time, adding clarity to tasks, enabling focus on high-productivity work and boosting ownership and accountability, too.
Explore Playtech’s 26% efficiency increase with monday.com project templates and automations, plus a 23% increase in meeting KPIs using dashboards.
3. Increase employee satisfaction with your working environment
Introducing management tools adapted to your business and people isn’t just about working smarter, more efficiently or more productively. We also see that it truly impacts teams’ work satisfaction, as they’re no longer having to chase their colleagues for follow-up, or having their colleagues chase them. Tasks are more easily completed, without repetitive, demoralising admin that takes up everyone’s time.
In essence, a platform giving employees the autonomy to work to their own patterns and priorities — while enhancing clarity and collaboration — makes for a more contented working environment. This is even more important with asynchronous work becoming increasingly popular, especially for companies spanning multiple offices, time zones and external providers.
Discover how Genpact eliminated 100% of spreadsheets for campaign management using monday.com and increased cross-team collaboration by 40%.
Naturally, more satisfied employees can lead to better quality work produced, so better outcomes for your company’s end clients. However, monday.com also enables boosting your employees’ satisfaction levels as clients themselves. By this, we mean facilitating faster, more accurate and effective responses when your teams make requests of each other, for IT support, say, or creative deliverables. With monday.com’s forms feature, these tasks no longer necessitate never-ending email threads. Instead, plugging all the details into pre-defined fields auto-assigns tasks to the right people for the job, with prompts for timely delivery to streamline internal follow-ups. You can also build SLAs around these forms, tracking response times to monitor and benchmark your internal efficiency, productivity and collaboration.
4. Introduce external collaboration for improved client relationships and cost-efficiency
Once your monday.com dashboards are up and running, you’re able to share specific aspects of them with your own external clients — at no extra cost.
To dive into how this works to enhance collaboration, and as a result productivity and efficiency, let’s take an agency setup as an example. Sharing marketing or PR planning with end clients instantly hands them insights into work processes and timelines, demonstrating confident transparency and welcoming the client to participate in and take ownership of the work process. In addition, this collaborative approach avoids both potential miscommunication and misaligned expectations, as well as the hours of meeting time previously needed to outline and adapt planning as projects evolve.
5. Extract the KPI metrics you need to evolve
We support our clients to ensure the dashboards they implement to manage specific internal processes fulfil a dual function: 1) providing task owners with the level of detail they need to complete objectives and 2) capturing the metrics required for their top-level reporting.
Constructing dashboards with these multifaceted outcomes in mind, your teams can not only track the day-to-day minutiae of smooth collaboration and delivery but also easily generate KPI reporting as needed. No more Friday afternoons spent scrambling to gather the previous week’s output for target reporting; with monday.com set up correctly, you’ll have reports generated automatically, simply opening your dashboard for real-time insights. Saving time and stress, enhancing efficiency and moving your business forward.
6. Roll out flexible integrations and intuitive, user-friendly workflows
Any wise management software provider knows that businesses have tools that would be tricky, or impossible, to replace. The answer lies in enabling wide-ranging, flexible integrations — and monday.com is no exception.
With hundreds of potential integrations that can be set up in a few clicks, monday.com empowers your teams to collaborate across tasks and software. What if your marketing, sales, project management and finance teams could inform each other’s work status with real-time data? Without needing to exchange emails or schedule meetings? And all while maintaining ownership of their department-specific information in their preferred program? Integrating Mailchimp, Salesforce and Xero via monday.com enables this, supporting your teams to democratise their data insights and collaboratively combine their brainpower to deliver faster and better for your customers.
With monday.com, it’s also quick and easy to set up new workflows, reminders and automations as a non-technical user, enabling teams and departments across your company to leverage the platform however best suits their ways of working. In fact, 85% of monday.com users have non-technical profiles, all maximising collaboration, productivity and efficiency on their terms. Provident CRM also provides these teams with the knowledge they need to continually improve business processes around their monday.com platform.
Media Contact
Leticia Nishida
Marketing Manager
Provident CRM has provided business and technology consultancy services across Ireland, the UK, and Europe for nearly twenty years. The company delivers cross-functional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations across Sales, Marketing, and Service departments, custom Marketing Automation (MA) integrations, and Business Process Management (BPM) services. All are supported by comprehensive training and continuous account management, ensuring successful adoption and deployment.
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