How you can set up your company with the right foundation to achieve success
Why should you care about enabling collaboration? It’s simple. Fundamentally, enterprise collaboration helps companies perform more efficiently every single day, which significantly improves employee performance and your bottom line. Chances are, your employees across the globe are eager to collaborate with each other, but they face major barriers to collaboration, such as faulty systems and tools and especially poor communication. Communication is extremely challenging when employees are globally dispersed, particularly when they can’t rely on existing systems and tools.
So how are employees supposed to collaborate if they can’t even communicate? Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President of Software Business Solutions at IDC, defines “collaboration” as “people or organizations working together to accomplish shared tasks/goals, facilitated by the effective combination of communication, tools and processes.” He goes on to emphasize that people must be connected first for the collaboration process to work. Sara Roberts, CEO of Roberts Golden Consulting, Inc., agrees: “The key to building successful companies will be through optimizing and encouraging communication. … Many forward-thinking organizations are already using robust Web-based communities to connect company alumni and other employees together and to harness the power of the crowd.” And we couldn’t agree more. While it sounds like a basic concept, in today’s globally diverse business environment, this connection requires much more than just basic email or virtual meeting systems.
Unfortunately, we see the following mistake all the time: In order to drive innovation and productivity, corporations have spent billions of dollars to connect global workers through advanced IT networks and software platforms, but companies are often forgetting the most important piece of the puzzle. Without a common company-wide language, companies risk confusion, productivity losses and miscommunication on a grand scale. With a common language, however, business processes and goals can come together and ultimately enable people to communicate so that they discover a mutual understanding or gain access to peer insights and ideas from across the globe. This is reflected in the views of upper management. For instance, an IBM Global CIO Study from 2011 found that “66 percent of CIOs from top-performing organizations see internal communication and collaboration as key to innovation.”
Making sure you can actually understand each other means, at the most basic level, team members working and communicating with each other proficiently in a single common language, seamlessly applying what they’re learning directly to their jobs. And it’s clear today that, across the globe, the language of business is English, an understanding of which is becoming imperative for job seekers. Reuters reported on the “English Crisis” in Japan. Yuriko Tsurumaki, a spokesperson for the Japanese recruiting firm Recruit Agent, stated that “nearly half of Japanese companies planning new hiring require applicants to be ‘Business English users’—a huge increase from just 16% in July 2009.”
Without communication fundamentals, collaboration becomes almost impossible. As Mahesh Ram, our CEO, puts it, ineffective collaboration makes it impossible for globally dispersed work teams “to deliver expected results because they aren’t communicating or working together effectively.”
Enterprise collaboration is the future of work at global companies. In fact, the market for social enterprise apps and related services will grow at a compounded annual rate of 61% to become a $6.4 billion market in 2016, according to a 2011 Forrester Research report by Henry Dewing. And since effective communication is key to achieving goals and increasing profits across the globe, you need to start using enterprise collaboration tools in your organization today. Growth in the collaboration industry is clearly accelerating, and businesses will surely need to adopt processes and technologies sooner than later to stay competitive. If you want to stay competitive in today’s global economy, we strongly urge you to consider adopting collaboration tools that are specially designed to support global business communications for non-native English speakers. Learn more about GlobalEnglish Bloom™, a unique enterprise social collaboration platform optimized for global business performance, now.
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It was a forward-thinking move, but not a surprising decision: In March 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten, told the 7,100 workers gathered at the company’s Tokyo headquarters that they had to become proficient in Business English—in just two years.
The growth of social collaboration has undoubtedly made the mastery of Business English more important than ever. But our recent 
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