Why Teamwork Is So Painful Infographic

A KnowledgeTree survey found that teamwork is at the heart of today’s businesses, and documents are central to how teams collaborate.

• Professionals rarely work in isolation. 94% of all contracts, proposals and other business documents require teams to produce.
• Documents are repeatedly revised. 90% of documents go through at least three revisions, with back-and-forth of input between colleagues.

The collaboration process is broken, and email is the culprit.

• Collaboration is not a pleasant experience. 79% of professionals said that the process of working across teams was frustrating.
• Feedback is a key part of teamwork, but it’s frustrating to manage. 59% of professionals gather input on contracts, proposals and other documents via email.
  • The cascade of suggestions and attachments via email is why only 16% of these professionals think it is easy to gather input.
• Sharing document-based information across teams isn’t easy. The ability to restrict access to just the right people and roles is difficult – in fact, more than half find controlling authorization to be a significant challenge when they share documents via email.

Collaboration is empty without process. But approval processes are inefficient.

• Email is the primary vehicle for approving documents, but it is not effective. 61% of contracts, budgets and other document approvals are done via email, but only 13% of users find the process to be efficient.
  • Why is it so frustrating? In addition to the multiple iterations, 59% of documents need to be revalidated post approval. So, filtering through old emails to find authorizations is difficult.
• Efficiency goes up drastically when email is removed from the picture. Respondents have increased productivity by 43 % and saved as much as three days for the average document with a document management system.

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