The way we use communication tools in business today is riddled with inefficiencies and frustrations. When you add up all the time we waste working around these irritations, it makes you realise how long we spend looking for the information we need to do our jobs, rather than actually doing our jobs. A study by McKinsey Global Institute in 2012 estimated that information workers spend 19% of their working week searching for and gathering information.
Here’s a list of 10 ways current tools waste our time – how many of them do you suffer from?
- A co-worker sent you some important information you needed. But you can’t remember how they sent it. Was it posted on the intranet? Sent in an email? In a chat on an instant messenger? You search each one, and finally find it in the last place you look.
- You’ve just joined a project that’s already underway. The project manager sends you several long email discussions about progress so far and open issues. You have to start at the bottom of each one and work your way up to understand the discussion, filtering out the frequent off-topic diversions.
- You’ve been sent a document to review. You read through it and send back your comments. Turns out that the author has already changed the document based on other peoples’ comments, and you were reviewing an old version.
- You get an email from your co-worker asking, “did you get the message I sent last Tuesday?” You trawl back through your inbox, spam folder and recycle bin trying to find it.
- You’ve been on vacation. You get back and find 600 new messages in your inbox. You spend all day going through them, and find that even after deleting all the spam, most of the messages that are left are parts of discussions that have been entirely resolved while you were away.
- You’re on the train on the way back from a customer meeting and receive a question in an email on your smartphone. You know you’ve got the answer in a document on your laptop, but you’ve run out of battery, so can’t get at it until you’re back at the office.
- A week ago, you asked 10 people in your department to indicate acceptance of a new company policy. Some of them have done it, others haven’t. You go back through your email working out who has replied, and send reminders to those who haven’t.
- You get an instant message from a co-worker saying they’ve shared a document with you on a file-sharing service. You log on to the service, and can’t see the document so you write back saying you don’t have access. Turns out they mistyped your email address when they shared it.
- You get a question from someone in the company you’ve never heard of. You’re a little cautious about how to reply because you don’t know them. So you ask your manager who it is; they don’t know either. You write back, politely asking who they are.
- You’re out of the office. Your mail app tells you your mailbox is full and can’t receive any new messages. You have to create personal folders on your laptop and download all the messages from your inbox. But you can’t get a reliable connection to the company VPN, so can’t sort it out until you get back to the office.
We created Vmoso specifically to address these, and other inefficiencies in the way businesses communicate today. Here’s how Vmoso solves each of the 10 problems.
- As an integrated suite of messaging, file-sharing and social networking, Vmoso offers a universal search which will help you find a discussion, whatever format it took place in.
- All the replies in a Vmoso discussion are listed in the right order. If you join halfway through, you simply start at the top and read through the discussion to catch up.
- Vmoso maintains a version history of each attachment. When you update a file, all references to that file are updated, so everyone can always see the latest version.
- Vmoso’s unique system of cross-referencing creates an interconnected web of content – instead of making people go and search, you can just include a direct link to it, even if it’s a specific comment in a discussion.
- Vmoso’s activity stream consolidates all replies in a discussion, and highlights those in which you have been explicitly mentioned. So it’s easy to see what you need to read, and what you can leave until later.
- Vmoso stores all your content and discussions in the cloud, and makes it available to any connected device, wherever in the world you are.
- Vmoso tasks let you quickly determine who’s completed the action they were given, and send reminders to those who haven’t.
- Only a unified communication system like Vmoso can offer a truly consistent layer of access control across all types of content.
- Every member in Vmoso has a profile, making it easy for you to find out more about them.
- All your Vmoso content is stored in the cloud and available to any device.
To sign up for Vmoso, click here, or download the iPhone or Android app.