How To Easily Improve Collaboration

In many industries, particularly the commercial real estate sector, the move towards more collaboration and more engagement across teams has only accelerated since the beginning of the pandemic. 

In the commercial real estate world, it is critical to work efficiently with your team. Otherwise, you end up losing deals and losing clients. But there is such thing as too much collaboration. Or rather, too much of the wrong collaboration. 

This effect has contributed to burnout across many organizations.

Don’t get us wrong, there’s nothing inherently wrong with collaboration, but according to Bloomberg Businessweek, most corporate employees spend as much as 85% of their working hours in collaborative sessions. Organizations have shifted structurally to be more nimble and agile, which has increased the number of interactions, meetings, phone calls, and other sessions employees are expected to have in a given day.

This increase in interaction means that 45 or 60 minute meetings are now crammed into 30 minutes, making interactions more intense. More sessions also means more context switching, and longer to-do lists at the end of your day to accomplish between meetings. This means most employees are starting earlier in the day and staying later at night, without necessarily providing any additional output. How many companies are risking losing talented employees through burnout?

The push towards being more nimble and agile isn’t a negative thing – as a software company, we understand better than most how important that concept is. However, if you don’t provide the right tools, instead relying on outdated, legacy technologies that basically do that same thing they did 20 years ago with an updated interface, then you risk asking your employees to do more work without having anything new to show for it.

Improving Collaboration

Can you realize the benefits of collaboration without creating burnout in your team? Yes!

One of the biggest steps you can take towards improving your organization’s ability to respond to change is providing tools that promote asynchronous collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration just means that the work you do with one or more other team members doesn’t necessarily have to happen at the same time. It means utilizing tools that allow users to access and work with the same data for different purposes and workflows. Different consumers of the information you’re working with need different functionality. Accounting needs to use data for one purpose, acquisitions for something else, and your finance team for yet something else.

We built a platform that doesn’t rely on everyone syncing schedules to get work done. It can happen in a more natural flow, reducing the daily context switching and days filled with meetings.

Important Features That Help Improve Collaboration

Notifications - It’s important in a collaborative tool that everyone stays up to date on important events. Set up and share alerts or reminders with your teammates when they need to be notified. Let it happen automatically and asynchronously so you’re not immediately distracted and mentally exhausted.

Institutional History - Using the wrong tools to collaborate means you lose data. Keeping data in old-school Excel files means they can disappear if someone’s hard drive gets corrupted. If someone leaves the company you may lose knowledge around the data they kept and how to use it. Store and keep information in one place, forever.

Dashboards - Increased visibility makes it easier to collaborate — you will always know what is happening! The use of a dashboard can help team members, especially team leaders, keep track of who needs to get what done. One of our newest features increases visibility around the lender reporting process. Our lender compliance dashboard provides users with a comprehensive, intuitive, visual of the necessary tasks for different members and displays their progress. 

Work Together Smoothly, Even While Working Remotely

Users of LoanBoss can share information to a multitude of interested parties and remain in control of how it’s used, which improves your team’s performance and communication without some of the negative side effects of using inefficient tools.

Retain institutional history and be able to retrieve it on demand, no matter where you’re at. 

Keep track of old quote information to help inform future deals. Curate actionable reports with up to date information, calculate accurate prepayment penalties instantly, and more. Streamline all of your processes so you can get back to adding value to the organization rather than being stuck in meeting after meeting.

We also abstract all of your loan documents and index all of that detail back to the original source document so you can find the information you need instantly, just a few clicks away. This means no more trying to dig up and navigate your way through a labyrinth of loan docs.

As a collaborative tool, you can invite guests to your account, or even choose to share and sync a deal’s information with another party, like a JV or a broker. It’s your choice.

Unlock the ability to collaborate seamlessly with your key partners.

The amount of time we spend on collaborative activities has only increased, a trend that was accelerated by the pandemic. Using the right tools can make that process less painful and more beneficial to both the organization and your employees. Spend less time in meetings and context switching, spend more time getting stuff done.

Check us out at LoanBoss.com!

Or Request a Demo to see our software in real time.

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