Guest Post: Ernie Smith, Associations Now
When it comes down to it, making collaboration software such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Asana work effectively comes down to people—not the tool itself.
Whether you’re talking about Trello, Asana, Google Workspace, InVision, Notion, Microsoft Teams, or Slack, workplace collaboration software is having a moment right now, and it’s one that will likely not fade away for a while. The pandemic merely maximized a budding interest in such tools.
That said, just because you have the software doesn’t mean that it will make your association work better overnight. In fact, collaborative software is the epitome of the truism that what makes a piece of software work for your organization is the people who use it—not the program itself.
So with that in mind, here are a few considerations for maximizing the potential of collaboration software in your organization:
Focus on finding the right tool for your organization—not someone else’s. It can be easy to get pulled in by the hype around a new collaboration tool, especially if it’s one that other organizations seem to be having good luck with. But just because it works for them doesn’t mean it works for you, writes Jed Cawthorne at CMSWire. “What I think some organizations will have found, is that for every well-meaning blog post or LinkedIn article, espousing the virtues of working a particular way with a particular tool, trying to put that advice into practice word for word just didn’t work for them,” he writes.
