In my previous post, I walked through three features we’ve built into Infodash that help you improve Connection between your firm and its employees – News Feeds, Celebrations and Events. In this part two of the three-part series focusing on Top Opportunities for Legal KM in 2022, I’ll walk you through a few features in Infodash that we have developed to enable and encourage employee Collaboration.
Collaboration amongst firm employees is more critical today than ever before. With remote work becoming more of the norm, it’s easier than ever for firm employees to become and stay siloed. This can lead to unnecessary stress and feelings of isolation that end up hurting the firm culture and productivity. To combat this, firms need tools in place that not only enable, but encourage ongoing collaboration amongst team members.
When the pandemic started, Microsoft realized that remote team members would need their Teams technology more than ever before, and thus began an unprecedented push to move companies towards their platform. With the same goal in mind, the Infodash platform was built not only integrated with SharePoint, but with Microsoft Teams as well.
Once again, I’ll jump into our Infodash demo environment to show you a couple of features that we’ve built specifically to help you enable and encourage employee collaboration within your firm.
User Profiles
The first foundational building block of collaboration starts with ensuring your team members have rich user profiles that give others insight into who they are, what they do and how you can connect with them. Infodash user profiles can be customized to show as much information about the user as you would like. The first thing you see when you open a user profile is a card displaying their professional headshot, title, location and contact information. This card can also be extended to show more information like hobbies/interests, tenure with the firm, standard rate and just about any other information you can think of. We also include links to the user’s social networks to make it easy for others to connect in communities outside of the firm’s intranet (and of course, these can be modified or removed if the user does not want to share these details!).
Scrolling down on the user profile, you’ll see more information about the user including People They Support, Language Proficiency, Bar Admissions and Groups the user is a part of.
These are just a few examples of content that can be added to a user profile. Every firm we’ve worked with wants to show different information on user profiles. For example, Education and Recent Documents Worked On are common sections on user profiles at many firms.
Again, the goal here is to make it quick and easy for team members to learn about their colleagues at a glance.
People Directory
Once team members have user profiles, they can be included in the firm People Directory. This directory is a comprehensive, refinable search engine built to help team members find others to collaborate with in just a few clicks.
Let’s say you’re working with a client and they have a question related to immigration. You’re not personally an expert in immigration, but you know that there are professionals in your firm that are. You’re not sure who to reach out to, so you visit the firm’s people directory and set your refiners to show individuals in the Immigration department.
With a single click, you’re shown a list of team members in the Immigration department.
From here, you have a few options to kick off your collaboration with these team members. You can reach out the traditional way via email or a phone call, or, if you select one or multiple employees, you are presented with an option to start a Microsoft Teams chat with them.
And just like that, you’re on your way to collaborating with the experts to get answers quickly for your client.
Conclusion
This was just a quick post to show you a couple of features built into Infodash with the goal of increasing employee collaboration, but hopefully you see the power and impact it can have within your firm. Since in-office collaboration is more challenging today with remote work, these tools offer the next best alternative to ensuring no employee feels siloed or alone while working to provide the best possible service for firm clients. The power of your firm is in the collective knowledge and expertise of your people, and Infodash was built to help you unlock and capitalize on that critical firm asset.
To learn more about how Infodash can help you increase employee collaboration in your firm, or to see the Infodash environment live, please contact us to schedule a demo.
In my next post, I’ll round out the series with a focus on how Infodash helps you improve employee Productivity within your firm. See you then!