TMCnews Featured Article

According to research from DoubleDutch, a provider of mobile engagement apps for workgroups, events and sales teams, a collaboration app can help cut e-mail volume in the workplace by as much as 34 percent. In addition, worker productivity increases as employees compete to try to top each other on worker productivity leaderboards.

E-mail overload and stress in the workplace has become a hot-button issue. In Germany, the government has decreed that employees can no longer be contacted outside of normal working hours. To protect the psychological health of workers, German lawmakers are considering ways to legislate what constitutes “free time” versus “working hours.”

For some companies, collaboration apps are the answer. Revolights, for example, is a Kickstarter-funded company that builds and sells revolutionary bicycle lights. To improve communication among its team members who hail from widely dispersed locations, Revolights has deployed the Pride app from DoubleDutch.

“As a small team on the go, we juggle a lot of different activities every day. The Pride app allows us to better collaborate by making basic, internal communication easy,” said Adam Pettler, Revolights’ co-Founder and CFO.

Two other collaboration apps from DoubleDutch, Hive and Flock, have been used by more than 100,000 employees at top companies like Cisco, HP, Lowe’s, Adobe (News - Alert) and Roche. Pride has more of a mobile focus and is available for both iOS and Android devices.

Specifically, DoubleDutch designed Pride for fast-moving startup companies and cross-functional enterprise workgroups. The app creates a structured feed of work-related activity by capturing contextual information like customer, project and location. Workers can share their projects, collaborate instantaneously and recognize each other’s contributions.

Pride contains points systems, leaderboards and badges that employers can use to drive friendly competition. DoubleDutch hopes that the competition element will help workers to overcome any hesitation that they may feel about adopting a mobile collaboration app.

“The speed and complexity of business is constantly increasing, particularly among startups and highly-matrixed teams,” noted Lawrence Coburn, founder and CEO at DoubleDutch. “We designed Pride to be a faster, more collaborative, mobile communications tool that fits the needs of the modern workplace more adequately than e-mail.”

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO. Follow us on Twitter.