Why Instant Messaging is Essential for your Startup

A startup begins with an idea which is then developed into a vision, but ensuring that this vision is realized takes a strategic approach.  For those of you just setting out with your startup, you’re most likely looking for ways to gain an edge over your competition wherever you can find it. While there’s no magic bullet, there is a way to give your startup an advantage by focusing on your biggest asset- your team. By working on developing your team through better collaboration and communication you’ll quickly see multiple benefits.

Team communication and collaboration is one of the most important elements of any business. This is especially true for startups as they usually don’t have the depth of other resources that larger, more established businesses can draw on. It’s one thing to recognize the key role that collaboration plays in your business, it’s another to know where to turn for support in this area. Things get especially tricky when working with remote employees.

Luckily Instant Messaging (IM) can help you in this process. Advances in Business IM technology mean that you can provide your team with a full range of collaborative features and functions, streamlined into individual programs. Business IM can both provide you with innovative collaboration tools, and simplify your team’s communication structure.

Not convinced yet? Here are three benefits you can bring to your startup today by using IM technology, as well as a few of the best IM programs for you to choose from. With the abundance of tools out there, however, you should make sure that you familiarize yourself with the potential benefits and drawbacks of each program so that you can make the right choice for your startup.

Increase team engagement and innovation

A team with members that communicate easily with one another and easily work together is an engaged team. By providing your team with the right tool to collaborate you’ll be well on your way to increasing their collaboration by meeting their personal interaction preferences. In fact, 63% percent of surveyed meeting attendees agreed with the statement: “I would attend more meetings and events virtually if the option were available.” This shows that providing employees with flexible options is one way to increase their engagement levels.

Google Hangouts is one solid option for flexible meeting formats. It will allow your team to not only attend virtual meetings, but given also allows collaboration on shared documents via Google Docs.  Highly collaborative employees are also innovative employees, as these areas build on each other. Thus by increasing your team’s engagement and collaboration, you’ll be setting your startup up for new innovations, just what you’ll need to drive your business forward.

Increase employee productivity 

Your startups growth largely depends on how productive your team is, and better collaboration is strongly linked to higher productivity as well.  One of the biggest challenges to productivity you’ll likely face in your startup is structuring complex processes and projects. Most likely your team will be engaging with such complex tasks, and individual team members will need to operate in a range of different roles.

Trello is more of a process management system than a strictly IM program. Utilizing the visual project management system designed by Toyota during the 60s and 70s, Trello helps structure projects through visualization of tasks and ownership on project boards. By helping your team to structure projects you can ensure that they’re equipped to take on the wide range of complex tasks that you’ll surely face as you grow your startup.

Provide communication structure

You may immediately think of free versions of popular programs such as Skype or Gchat when speaking of instant messaging, but there is much more to this area than simple peer to peer chat clients. In fact, some programs specialize in providing an entire communication structure through privately administered internal networks for businesses. This gives you the freedom to create an individualized private network for your team that will keep them both focused and productive.

Brosix Instant Messenger is one such program. With Brosix you get a fully administrable team network with a comprehensive set of collaboration features, meaning that your colleagues can communicate through chat rooms, text, visual and audio chat, virtual whiteboards, and screensharing, among other features. This structured approach to team communication also allows you to administer your network as you see fit, adding, removing and grouping team members as you see fit.

In conclusion

Your startup’s success will depend not only on the strength and uniqueness of your vision, but on your ability to both align your team to it and provide them with what they need to work towards achieving it. By giving your team the right communication and collaboration tool through business instant messaging, you can make progress towards increasing their productivity and engagement. Your teams ability to collaborate is crucial, never more so in the ever-increasingly remote labor market. Let the experts developing and innovating in the field of business IM help you take your startup to the next level!