If you’ve ever held a decision making role at your organization, you know that understanding the benefits of introducing any kind of strategy – marketing, sales – is only half the battle. If you’re serious about making a change you’ll need to demonstrate how to translate benefits into a real Return on Investment (ROI) for your organization.
Implementing a collaboration tool is no different.
Incentives are important to everyone. From an organizational level, if you’ve spent money on implementing tools that enable collaboration you’ll want to know that your money was well used. If you’re asking staff to make changes in how they work each day, they need to understand the benefits to both themselves, as well as the business.
Depending on your organization, there are many areas in which you might choose to calculate your ROI. Calculating ROI often comes down to measuring the amount of resources expended vs how much you’ll get back. So if you’re spending money on implementing a collaboration tool, you’ll want to be sure that it’s saving you money down the road.
Two areas where most organizations are focused on coming out on top are time saved and money saved. It will come as no surprise that these two areas work hand in hand – as the old adage says ‘time equals money’. If employees are using collaboration to get tasks finished quickly their productivity is rising – effectively saving the organization money.
For a more concrete example of how money can be saved, think about travel costs. If you’ve got employees located in different offices, chances are they are frequently flying in for meetings and to spend time with co-workers. With a digital collaboration solution in place, employees can create more personal connections with colleagues online. Sure, this won’t entirely make-up for face-to-face meeting time, but it may reduce the number of trips required, saving your bottom line.
These are just two suggestions on how to calculate the ROI of collaboration – different organizations may have other formulas. Our Usage Reports feature offers our clients with data on their firm’s usage of the app to generate accurate ROI reports.
What are you measuring for? Let us know in the comments below.