3 Trends Shaping Business Productivity and Collaboration in 2017

What do millennial employees, high-utility technology, and a shifting business productivity landscape have in common? For many organizations, these three factors have turned early 2017 into the "Year of Collaboration." From policy to practice to the technology driving it, organizations across the board are clearly bullish on the young workforce's collective desire to better work together.

Here's a look at the year (so far) in collaboration and the way these trends could shape the months and years to come:

1. BYOD's Continued Importance

No, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) is nothing new on its face. Organizations have grown more and more friendly toward personal devices as of late, and the call only gets easier to make as technology improves and penetration rates skyrocket. Instead, according to MeriTalk, the story is just how important these devices are to a millennial workforce. In an era where your tech choices serve as an extension and reflection of yourself, the ability to integrate your work habits with the hardware platforms of your choice is considered more of a right than a privilege.

Thus, the collaboration-minded company doesn't just approve of BYOD — it capitalizes on it. Integrated mobility tools allow employees to connect with co-workers, engage with clients, and project the organization's presence for their personal hardware. For instance, an employee could use the same phone- or laptop-based business app to check a co-worker's availability, leave revisions on a shared document, and send a business text with some final thoughts. He or she could then use the same device and app to place a call to a valued client, complete with the company's name and phone number showing up on caller ID.

And those are just two examples. Ultimately, there are countless ways BYOD can help businesses and their employees stay productive and collaborative. It's worth giving the practice its due space in your business productivity plans, because it's not going away anytime soon.

2. Don't Forget BYOS

Of course, hardware and associated operating systems are just one side of the "BYO" coin. Employees can also have personal — and sometimes deeply personal — preferences when it comes to the software they use, a trait companies can leverage to effect collaboration among their workers.

The increased availability and functionality of cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) suites is one helpful advancement for companies looking to accommodate personal workflows. Instead of buying individual full licenses, the company can purchase affordable subscriptions for precisely the number of people wanting to use this tool or that service. This means your office's diehard Dropbox™ fan can easily link her personal cloud storage account to a business-run one, with administrative oversight tools allowing a measure of privacy and policy adherence. Compared to the employee going "shadow IT" — that is to say, carting private work files around in his personal account without permission — this represents an inexpensive way to stay compliant and bolster productivity and collaboration.

Better, storage is far from the only tool to receive a SaaS makeover. Tools running the gamut of business needs — word processing, project management, graphic design, video editing, and more — can be purchased on a monthly, a-la-carte basis, making BYOS a viable policy in all sorts of workplaces. Throw in a focus on interoperability between many competing products, and voila — business collaboration, productivity, and personal choice no longer need to be mutually exclusive goals.

3. The Internet of Things: More Than a Customer Tool

When you hear about the Internet of Things (IoT) in your industry, there's a good chance the chatter comes with a customer-focused spin. This makes sense, at least to a point. It's how the discussion is framed in the larger tech media, and many consumer-focused IoT tools are downright nifty, too.

However, customer-facing tools are just one facet of the IoT's era. Great things are being done on the business collaboration front today. According to The Next Web, organizations can boost productivity and collaboration with internet-connected location- and status-reporting tools, unified communication-enabled desk phones, "print anywhere" printers, and metric-reporting sensors. For example, the last item on that list can provide valuable performance insights to HR and management teams.

And that's just the beginning of the IoT's value in the collaborative workspace. In fields as far ranging as manufacturing and marketing, logistics, and legal, the connect-everything mantra will increasingly drive business productivity, process, and collaboration throughout the year and beyond. In other words, the IoT's combination of low cost and high utility will become too much to pass up.

The Year in Collaboration

Like the companies that foster it, collaboration takes a lot of shapes. For some organizations, making a more collaboration-friendly space is as simple as buying or subscribing to cloud-backed communication or productivity tools. For others, a collaborative office means a connected office, with cutting-edge tools reporting metrics, providing statuses, and simplifying work processes.

The true constant is that people want to work together, and they want tools that best allow them to do that. Considering all the business productivity benefits a little teamwork can bring, this makes an endless list of reasons to make your office more collaboration-friendly — and very few reasons not to. What better time than now to make it happen with a VoIP business phone system?

To learn more about collaboration tools, contact a Vonage Business consultant.