What Is Collaboration?
Collaboration is a process where two or more individuals or organizations work together to achieve a common goal or complete a task. This involves sharing information, communicating, and cooperating in order to utilize diverse skills and perspectives in order to solve problems and drive innovation.
Why Collaborative Work Environment Is Important
A group of employees has more impact on the success of a business compared to individual work. There’s a lot to gain from shared creation, knowledge, and innovation. By working together, team members understand how their colleagues think, work, and operate. In turn, employees learn from each other and build upon their strengths.
At the end of it all, the organization and employees benefit greatly from group collaboration. Some of the top benefits of good collaboration include:
- Enhances Problem Solving Skills: Excellent collaboration in an organization can help with crisis management. When different individuals pool their talents, skills, knowledge, expertise, and perspectives, there’s a greater chance of finding plausible solutions. For example, when a project hits a wall, the more eyes you add to the project, the easier it becomes to spot issues and resolve them.
- Fuels Innovation: Collaboration brings together the various perspectives of different individuals. This exposes people to a wide pool of ideas and different approaches. Their skills complement each other, and through their interaction, they are constantly updated with new information. This creates a continuous cycle of ideation, which can accelerate the generation of new creative ideas.
- Increases Engagement: Employee engagement has several benefits in an organization.
Apart from lowering absenteeism by up to 41%, highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to quit their jobs.
Similarly, according to a Stanford study, employees who worked on tasks collaboratively stuck 64% longer than their solitary colleagues. They even reported higher engagement levels.
This proves that when employees support each other, there’s a boost in participation. You also get a high-performing team that is ready to embrace change since collaboration makes it easy to solve any obstacles.
- Promotes Open Communication: For teams to collaborate successfully, there must be strong communication. Effective communication facilitates information exchange, transfer of ideas, and smooth workflow. People ask questions, dig deep into discussions, and even disagree in certain instances.
- Boosts Employee Morale and Happiness: Team collaboration in the workplace creates an atmosphere where each individual feels heard and valued. Employees can contribute equally towards the same goal and work together as a team, no matter their position.
According to an Accountemps survey, 33% of HR practitioners believe that poor collaboration is one of the major causes of morale issues. Meanwhile, 38 percent believe that communication is the most effective way to boost engagement.
- Improves Productivity: When a collaborative and well-coordinated group comes together to work towards a common goal, the result is faster production. Working in groups makes employees more efficient, and the higher engagement levels maximize performance.
- Fosters Skill Sharing: Part of team collaboration is tabling ideas and knowledge to try to solve problems or create new ideas. There will be lots of information flow and exchange of expertise, as well as feedback and viewpoints.
- Aligns Remote Teams:Team collaboration brings teams together, and helps them stay connected, aligned, and updated.
Owl Lab research shows that 16% of companies globally operate fully remote. While it has its advantages, one downside of working remotely is that teams feel lonely and siloed.
Challenges of Setting Collaborative Environment
Realizing the fundamental importance of group collaboration in the workplace is just the beginning. The real work starts when you begin cultivating a collaborative environment.
Your company culture will greatly contribute to the success of a collaborative team, and there will be many challenges to overcome:
- Managing distributed teams. Where teams don’t know each other well, it can be tremendously difficult to share knowledge with one another. Teams will be less inclined to proactively cooperate and this can stall projects.
- Resistance to change. Change is not everyone’s cup of tea. Some will take to new strategies with enthusiasm, while others will view them with negativity and skepticism. It won’t be easy to inspire team collaboration when a section of team members isn’t on board with your new initiatives.
- Insufficient or outdated tools. There can’t be team collaboration without the right tools to support it in the first place. The world now operates digitally, meaning there’s heavy reliance on technologies that support internal communication and project management. If you don’t invest in the right tools, you won’t realize the full potential of a collaborative team.
- Silo mentality. Apart from distance, the tension between departments, resource hoarding, and unhealthy competition can create a silo mentality in an organization. This is when team members fail or refuse to share information with other departments within the same organization. This can result in inefficiencies and poor performance of employees.
- Information overload. Your collaboration approach may be great the first time, but then you end up overdoing it with information overload. If you implement too many training videos, communication tools, meetings, and so on, your employees will feel overwhelmed and confused. This can leave a negative impact on performance and participation.
Effective Collaboration Strategies
1. Create a compelling mission that will Inspire your team
First and foremost, you need to provide a compelling reason why team members should be part of the company vision. You need to give employees a cause to be part of, something that will inspire them to show up to work each day. In a way, you’re also setting yourself up to be a transformational leader who motivates employees to be productive.
That’s why you should define your company’s mission so you can bring your staff together under one common goal that you’ll all be working towards. Your mission should be compelling enough to make them passionate about their jobs.
The more passionate they are, the more likely they’ll put more effort into achieving the organization’s mission.
2. Set the team’s goals
Team members must know their individual – as well as team – goals that they are working towards. These objectives will help them stay focused and productive while working collectively.
Be sure to communicate your team’s goals for each project and re-evaluate and redirect as necessary. At the end of each project, find effective ways to measure and celebrate progress, wins, and achievements and pinpoint what needs improvement.
3. Clarify expectations
The best approach to minimize confusion is to communicate clearly defined expectations for collaboration. These should be set from the start and integrated into the company culture. In fact, you should make it part of employee onboarding so that new hires can join teams knowing you prioritize team collaboration.
You can implement your expectations by:
- Explaining to each team member what’s expected of them and how their role contributes to team success.
- Providing details about how they will carry out individual roles collaboratively.
- Hosting weekly team meetings to check on how they are coping with their roles and responsibilities and gauge if they can take on more roles.
4. Incorporate technology that supports collaboration
According to a Deloitte study, digital collaboration in the workplace brings satisfaction among employees. 17% of respondents were happier with their company culture when they had access to the right tools for teamwork. For these employees, digital collaboration programs improve productivity, transparency, communication quality, and morale.
Companies can accomplish more by investing in the various technological tools available. Such tools can:
- Connect remote workers regardless of their location
- Track time, employee productivity levels, and project progress using a time tracking app
- Allow members to share documents, projects, and anything work-related with ease
- Create ways to share feedback, ideas, concerns, and insights
- Provide solutions to work collaboratively on documents and projects
To ensure that everyone’s doing their share of work, use employee monitoring software. Traqq logs a user’s work hours, activity levels, website access, and app usage.
At the same time, Traqq will also help you identify struggling workers and those who can take more tasks. By distributing jobs efficiently, you’re also fostering a healthy work culture.
5. Highlight individual team member’s strengths
A good collaboration strategy is to understand each of your employees and assign tasks that reflect their individual strengths.
A report by Forbes shows that 66% of employees would quit their jobs if they didn’t feel appreciated. This percentage jumps to 76 percent among millennials. You probably identified an employee’s specific strengths during the recruiting process.
Doing so will make your team feel trusted, supported, and valued. Additionally, when team members know each other’s strengths, they’ll know who to turn to when they need specific information or help.
6. Ask for Feedback
Employees will be more comfortable working when they are included in the decision-making process. By asking for feedback, you’ll know how to effectively create teams comprising like-minded people who prefer the same work styles.
7. Recognize and Reward Successful Team Collaboration
One effective strategy to encourage workplace behaviors is through recognition and reward. When you reward collaborative behavior, you’re sending the right message to other team members about the values of your business.
They’ll know what actions or attitudes you expect from them, and this can help increase motivation and engagement.
Collaboration Makes the Team Work
Implementing your collaboration strategies takes a lot of work and a combination of the right tools. Its success, however, depends on various aspects like encouraging open communication, fostering cohesion among employees, and rewarding successful collaborations.
Most importantly, be sure to get team input before introducing any new initiatives. This makes them feel part of something bigger and more likely to embrace new changes.
