Across industries and geographies, the pandemic has triggered a paradigm shift in the way companies—and their employees—conduct day-to-day business. The move to work-from-home and hybrid work models has increased the need for collaboration to facilitate communication and innovation from remote locations, and to keep teams connected and engaged when in-person meetings are difficult or impossible.

Successful collaboration requires creating an equitable experience for all team members, says Faiza Hughell, RingCentral's chief customer officer. “Participant equity is predicated on the ability to empower your employees with the tools, technologies, and programs they need to reach success, to remain productive at all times,” she explains.

And it’s more important than ever for companies to evaluate the new technologies teams are implementing to ensure they are facilitating the desired outcomes, as well as to assess a particular technology’s potential application to other areas and teams in the company. “In a sales organization, for example, certain teams may have access to certain tools that increase their productivity. Well guess what? Other teams might be able to benefit from that as well,” says Hughell. “It's important when we bring in new technologies that we negotiate our contracts such that they're flexible, so we can determine who needs the technology.”

When evaluating new technologies to drive and support distributed workforces, Hughell suggests paring up individuals, which not only helps people learn, but drives adoption of the new technology and helps the company assess whether it’s bringing the expected results. “I always tell my leaders inspect what you expect. Don't just buy a piece of technology, roll it out and expect miracles to happen,” she says. “You have to drive adoption and usage, and you might find that it was the wrong technology and it's not serving your desired outcome or purpose, at which point, make that decision as a leader to fast fail and move on.”

The most important best practice is to do what’s necessary to empower your employees to succeed. Providing libraries of bite-size instruction videos, for instance, can help team members learn specific features of new technology related to their work, without having to sit through long training sessions. Creating the atmosphere of learning and collaboration is as important to a company’s success as implementing the new technology. “At the end of the day,” says Hughell, “if you can show someone that you're going to help empower their success and help increase their productivity and reduce friction in their day-to-day operation, not many people would argue with that.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with RingCentral.