Collaboration key to corporate success

Enterprises who enable and facilitate greater employee collaboration are more financially successful, according to new research conducted by Frost & Sullivan and sponsored by Verizon Business and Microsoft.

In fact, the research showed that collaboration is a key driver of business performance, and more significant than having a strategic plan or other market conditions, said Nancy Gofus, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Verizon Business. Collaboration included use of a variety of forms of intracompany communication including email, common calendaring, audio and Web conferencing, instant messaging and presence.

The survey involved 946 executive decision-makers at companies with revenues of $5 billion to $10 billion annually. The respondents were divided equally between the North American, European and Asia-Pacific markets.

“We wanted to really try to understand how people are using technologies around the world,” Gofus said. “We wanted to see if we could define any real linkage between the way companies use collaboration and their business performance.”

As part of the research, Frost & Sullivan developed a collaboration index that quantified the relationship between collaboration and business performance. The index was based on a corporation’s available collaboration technology, its corporate attitude toward inter-department collaboration, its organizational structure and its actual use of collaborative capabilities.

“The survey measured attitudinal perspective — do you bring teams together to work, how open is senior management to collaboration, how well do teams collaborate across disciplines?” Gofus said.

That collaborative index was then compared to each company’s business performance, measured by things such as growing revenue, growing market share and performance measured against others within the business segment.

The research showed collaboration was a leading driver for profitability, profit growth and sales growth, she said. It had twice the impact of strategic orientation – whether or not a company has a strategic plan for the future – and five times the impact of market volatility.

Collaboration’s effect was particularly important in driving customer satisfaction.

“Acquiring the customer requires right strategy – but once you have those customers, to satisfy them,to execute on productivity – it does have a lot to do with how do the people within that company come together, across disciplines and geography to execute successfully,” she said.

The research also found significant cultural differences in how companies like to collaborate. U.S. workers tend to be more independent, are satisfied with ‘one-way’ communications such as email or leaving messages and embrace conferencing. Europeans prefer to work in teams, like real-time communications, and avidly deploy new technology. Asians have embraced telecommuting, are the biggest users of IM, but also rely heavily on the phone and are the most travel-averse.

The research will be used to enable Verizon, a leading reseller of Microsoft’s Live Meeting technology, both to tailor its approach to different markets based on the cultural differences and to work with CIOs to show how they can empower their employees and improve their company’s financial results in the process, Gofus said.