Collaboration platforms or enterprise social networks are implemented for improving productivity and employee engagement. A Gallup study estimates that 22 million actively disengaged employees cost American economy as much as $350 billion dollars per year. While a report by Allegiance informed that replacing an employee costs as much as 150% of the position’s salary in training and recruiting. Collaboration platforms have proven to increase productivity by 20-25% as per various reports.

However, evaluating the effectiveness of a collaboration platform and the ROI is challenging. That’s because the categories involved seem like intangible concepts that are hard to measure. Yet, if you have a clear objective in mind before implementing the platform, some simple ways can help you measure the ROI. Let’s look at some of them:

Interaction v/s emails
You need to take a few cases from your company to track the volume of emails before implementing the collaboration platform. You can pick the same cases after the implementation and measure the changes. McKinsey Global Report had stated that knowledge workers spend 28 hours each week by writing e-mails, searching for information and collaborating internally. This implies an approximate 5 hours of unproductive work per day.

Decrease in travel time
A great enterprise collaboration would have eliminated the need for more personal meetings for dispersed teams and workers. You can check the travel bills before the enterprise social network began functioning, and it would give you a parameter to measure the ROI.

Less hiring, training cost
You must compare the data of training and recruitment costs with that of the current data when interviews, training sessions happened through videos or collaboration tools.HR professionals can easily compare this data and help in adding to the calculations of ROI.

Turnaround times
There can be several turnaround times that can be taken into consideration: the time to deliver projects, time spent in customer interaction, lead generation, conversion of leads into sales etc. You can fetch this data through customer ticket generation, built-in reports, missed deadlines – features that are usually part of an enterprise social network.

Customer service and revenue
An engaged workforce is often more inclined to delight customers. You can track customer feedbacks, client complaints, redressal of complaints etc through the collaboration platform itself in order to measure the ROI. Then you can take into account the new revenue generated from old clients and the revenue from new clients.

The above costs must then be compared to the actual investment including software license fee, deployment, maintenance, integration costs, additional hardware required etc along with the time taken to train the staff and getting them on to the platform. The result will not be 100% accurate but good enough to give you a realistic feedback on the effectiveness of the collaboration platform.

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