MAY 2016CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM 19Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Team Enabling employee collaboration can be a struggle for many companies in this digital age. When budgets are tight, we tend to focus solely on driving the bottom line. But employee engagement and team collaboration are a struggle worth overcoming. Research shows that when the lines of communication are broken, a company's performance suffers. According to Holmes Report, around $37 billion is lost yearly from lack of communication between employees. When employees collaborate and communicate effectively, not only are they more engaged, but company performance improves. Gallup revealed that when employees are engaged, companies reap the payoffs. For instance, at businesses with more engaged employees, they experienced 147 percent higher earnings per share (EPS) compared with their competition that same year. Below are five tips on boosting not only office but companywide communication and productivity.1. Hire people based on their skills, not their location. A company is only as good as its best team members, and millennials are taking the workplace by storm. They expect and demand flexibility. Because they can and will work from anywhere, don't miss out on their talents and skills by limiting your search. Broaden it. It does not mean that these folks don't need to meet in person on a regular basis but tools like Astana, Slack and Skype make teamwork across distance possible and real. And it's not just about millennials, either. Some of your best talent might be sitting in another country altogether. Top talent is everywhere. We often forget to look south and north in instead of east and west. Because of time zones, it is often easier to have teams in San Paulo and Denver work together than Boston and Prague, for example With today's technology, there's no need to hire people solely based on their location or yours. Keep an open mind and look for talent outside your local region. 2. Reengineer the way you communicate with coworkers.Regular dialog helps keep people on the same page. Whether it's in formal meetings or the proverbial water cooler chat, great ideas stem from good conversations. It's true that distributed teams can be more challenging to keep in the loop. Different time zones make people available at different times and there's a chance that messages, emails, and ideas get Warren Barkley, CTO, SMART Technologies5CXOINSIGHTS
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