When Zoom is Not Enough: 3 Steps to Boost Collaboration in a Post-Pandemic Era

Let’s go back to January before the pandemic. It's just another sunny day in Buenos Aires. Employees are arriving at the office early in the morning. A couple of colleagues run into each other and talk about the progress of a new project soon to be launched. Others greet each other on their way to the cafeteria and start discussing ideas for a sales pitch to be made that afternoon. A colleague, who is working at her desk, turns her chair round and asks a coworker sitting right next to her: "Have you got a minute? - I really need your help!" 

It wasn’t long ago that face-to-face interactions like the above-mentioned examples were commonplace in the day-to-day functioning of any organization. Indeed, informal communication between coworkers like exchanging new ideas and different perspectives or giving feedback on each other’s work have been an essential component of organizational culture. 

But social disruption caused by the outbreak of a pandemic forced us to work remotely and in isolation. In this new reality all these interactions are lost, and with them an important portion of the benefits mentioned above. Everything has to be carefully planned or triggered by a phone call, creating a new level of friction for human collaboration. 

While seeking intelligent solutions to adapt to the new normal quickly, many business leaders are wondering how they can better use technology to ensure that employees feel connected to the organization, emotionally secured and self-motivated. 

To better understand the changes that are occurring in the private sector, Globant has conducted a survey of hundreds of employees in the U.S. Among some of the revealing insights, it shows that almost one-half of the respondents agree that their work output has decreased since they started working from home. They point out that one of the main reasons for the decrease in productivity is the difficulty to interact, communicate and bond with other team members. 

So, how can we maintain group productivity and team engagement from the synergy we lost by not being able to work next to each other anymore? The answer is simple: artificial intelligence. AI can help us not only to connect physically, but also to replicate those casual interactions of everyday life.  

Let’s go into the three steps of Augmented Collaboration. Three ways to eliminate the new human frictions of the pandemic era, increasing productivity and making teams more efficient. 

1. Disrupt team composition

One of the first ways to ensure better productivity when people are not physically in an environment that we can control is to increase autonomy. Contrary to what is commonly thought, fear of output being disrupted by less control is unfounded. The traditional command and control structures add an overhead that does not equate with increased productivity. 

Don’t be afraid of turning things upside down and put the employee at the center of your organization. Put your trust in your teams, empower them to self regulate and be owners of results. Our Agile Pods Framework allows teams to learn continuously, think systemically, adapt quickly to change and create a sustaining team-client alignment to create value while delivering services. 

2. AI to foster culture and personal connections

We know that culture can make a company thrive or die, and that social connections are one of the most important factors that promote employee engagement. Today, it’s more important than ever to let digital experiences become your cultural cornerstone. We need to recover what we lose by not being able to sit next to each other.  

Artificial intelligence can be the answer. Globant’s StarMeUp OS was created to help understand the human tissue within an organization. It allows employees to form deeper connections, while also providing real-time insights based on behavioral data so leadership always has a read on the pulse of company culture and how to best improve and shape it moving forward. These insights help identify people with fewer connections or understand what’s working well in certain areas. It can even help predict attrition or detect informal leadership.  

By using AI it becomes possible to proactively trigger meetings and connections among individuals that would have been naturally connected (like in the case of working in an office) or should be exchanging experiences but in this new normal, they are far away. 

3. AI to augment team capabilities

When you no longer have a colleague sitting next to you to ask for suggestions or to learn from, AI can become the solution to augment your teams’ skills and their inner collaboration. With Augmented Coding, developers can enhance their coding experience and capabilities. It shortens the learning curve as they can receive suggestions to improve their work and examples of different solutions. It’s like having a personal expert to help you understand how every single line of code works. It can also find code within a project repository which is a perfect solution to develop faster and more consistently within the project.

The collaboration dynamics may be changing as the world adjusts to the current challenges, but if we act quickly, we can define what our new reality will be. Augmented Collaboration is the model needed to exponentially scale the potential of our teamwork. Employees will thrive as organizations become truly AI-powered . Because the more employees connect to each other the better they collaborate; and when collaboration is strong, culture will expand to make businesses shine.