Supercharge Your Teams Collaboration Considerations for 2025

This past year, we watched battles play out between employers and employees over the role of remote work in their organizations. Should it be fully embraced, rejected outright, or some hybrid arrangement? 

While many framed this high-stakes war as a struggle between management overreach and worker self-interest, both sides vigorously defended their claims that their version of the work environment was the most productive and, therefore, the best model to implement for the business’s long-term health.  

For the year ahead, the important question will no longer be, “Where will employees work?” but rather, “How can we ensure work gets done most effectively?” The focus on productivity should shape our collaboration considerations in 2025: Do our organizations have the correct tools in place to efficiently realize their business deliverables regardless of where people work?

Voice and video technology tools that enable remote communication, such as Zoom, Webex, and Teams, have proliferated and erased many of the initial “place” problems that were endemic at the outset of remote work initiatives. Now, organizations must ensure their employees have connectivity and the tools that enable the creation of work products.  

Teams gather information, make decisions, and work on projects together. Instead of merely meeting a team’s communication needs, technology is needed that transcends communications to define new collaborative pathways to get results – and delight employees and employers, regardless of where a team is located.

Moving beyond video calls—the need for the virtual workspace 

During the pandemic, many of us got so wrapped up in the novelty of connecting with colleagues from home that we forgot that we were meeting to get work done. Now we ask, how can we make sure meetings are valuable and collaboration is effective? What steps and tasks are needed to produce a deliverable? Without getting too far into the weeds, nearly every workflow boils down to assembling information to make a decision.

When considering supercharging collaboration in 2025, we must focus on creating and ensuring we have properly supported the collaborative virtual workspace in which actual work gets done. Beyond audio and video communications, collaboration requires that employee teams have access to a virtual environment that recreates the dynamic of being together in a large conference room with all the data, documents, and options pinned up on the walls and all the decision-makers seated at the table.

Our brains are wired to look for the big picture, so we need to gather and review inputs and options before making a decision.

Producing actual work

I can almost hear some of you groan at the thought of adding yet another tool. Fortunately, options exist for flexible virtual workspaces that integrate with the tools and apps you already use. And gather the data streams, analysis, documents, videos, and graphics you already have. And conform to the processes and workflows you’ve already established. In other words, a workspace that acts as a catalyst for creating work products.

Recently, my team worked with the marketing division of a large media and entertainment powerhouse to supercharge their collaboration by implementing a virtual workspace, and the results reshaped the way they approached remote work. 

This marketing team realized that their initial attempts at remote work were unproductive. Rather than focus on outcomes, their collaboration was mostly centered around conversations. Daily calls failed to make progress when teams couldn’t come to a shared understanding or effectively produce shared rich-media deliverables. With special effects people in London, creatives in LA, and the majority of marketing resources in New York, their remote employees dreaded creative review calls that went on for hours and were frequently punctuated with unproductive screen-share sessions.   

The department introduced an easy-to-use, unstructured virtual workspace to improve outcomes and redefine collaboration. The legacy audio and visual communications tools and the specialty image-centric and data analysis tools the teams were using became an additive to a unified workspace. Democratizing access to content puts the focus back on creating the best deliverable possible and improving outputs across the board. 

Within months, surveyed teams realized they were making better, faster decisions with fewer people. The workspace returned a 40% savings in cycle times. The team also heard from employees that they were thrilled with the new process and the ease of sharing ideas. Real-world results are now front and center as the department revisits remote work strategies going forward.

Supercharging your teams

The best practices around adopting a persistent, virtual workspace can be summarized in five tips.

1. Don’t overthink it: Your workflow and work patterns will be memorialized over time, so just get started and build your future work templates as you go. Create a virtual, persistent workspace, introduce teams, and begin.
2. Prioritize security: Everything involved with collaboration is intellectual property in our digital world. You need a workspace that gathers and protects assets, ideas, and people. No compromises.
3. Choose flexibility: Processes and technology change, so select a virtual workspace that’s flexible enough to handle the flux. Think about one that gives you all the room you could ever need, the ability to connect with other tools, apps, and data stores, and add various assets to the workspace. Don’t stop at notecards! Images, videos, and rich media are often the backbone of efficient communication.
4. Look to scale up: If your goal is growth, you’ll need a workspace that won’t choke on your workload, that’s accessible from anywhere, and can be extended to a large group.
5. Be future-ready: Choose a virtual workspace with a robust API for integrating emerging technology, like AI.

Many organizations have moved on from the great “place” debate, finding that flexible policies and a broader talent pool benefit them. Others insist that gathering in the office is their secret sauce. Regardless, modern work demands an environment where teams can host a show-and-tell process that drives toward decisions and deliverables – and that environment is virtual. To fuel your teams for better collaboration and greater productivity, weigh the factors and choose yours wisely.