86 percent of employees believe that workplace failures are caused by a lack of collaboration. Have you had similar experiences?

It's never easy to achieve successful collaboration in a company. Perhaps your company's departments are siloed, or there are too many teammates working remotely, or most meetings are ineffective and waste employees' time.

While it may appear that investing in the latest technologies and tools is the most obvious option, company leaders must realize that tools can only be effective if they are used in conjunction with a strong collaboration strategy.

The importance of collaboration with remote teams – A Complete Guide 

Benefits of collaboration in the workplace

As workplace collaboration improves, so does the organization's ability to deal with unexpected developments. When new disruptive technologies enter the market or customer preferences shift, workplace collaboration makes it easier for businesses to pivot.

Collaboration is a key component of agile and scrum processes, allowing teams to be more responsive and flexible.

Improved flexibility

 As workplace collaboration improves, so does the organization's ability to deal with unexpected developments. When new disruptive technologies enter the market or customer preferences shift, workplace collaboration makes it easier for businesses to pivot.

Collaboration is a key component of agile and scrum processes, allowing teams to be more responsive and flexible.

Higher engagement

Only 33% of total employees are now engaged, which suggests that if you don't act to address this issue, your company is in grave danger. Employees that are constantly ready to welcome change can benefit from cross-organizational collaboration.

Productive meetings

Nearly 67 percent of meetings fail, and unproductive meetings cost businesses more than $37 billion per year.

Employees are able to successfully complete their work by collaborating with their team members online when collaboration is deeply integrated in an organization's business culture. There are fewer meetings held when collaboration is strongly embedded into an organization's corporate culture.

Meetings are only held for very required topics that demand proactive engagement in this manner, saving employees' time and increasing their productivity.

How to instill a collaborative mindset 

While each organization's implementation of workplace collaboration will be different, there are some best practices that should be followed for efficient collaboration:

Follow a top-down approach

Executives and corporate leaders must lead by example, aggressively promoting collaboration as one of the key company principles, in order to make collaboration effective in an organization. Employee engagement and efficiency might also benefit from management involvement.

Rewards and incentives

Instead of rewarding individuals solely for their individual achievements, businesses should also provide bonuses and incentives for team accomplishments. The goal is to reduce internal competition so that employees don't view their coworkers as competitors. Instead, they should view their employees as assets in the fight against external competition.

Clearly defined guidelines

Employees need to know where to access essential information and how to properly do the task that has been assigned to them, thus there must be a defined channel of communication throughout the organization.

Adapt continuously

It is critical for organizations to remain adaptable in their approach after implementing the needed collaborative processes. Employee input can be used by department managers to identify bottlenecks and areas for development. Furthermore, you should not expect a new technology to fix all of your difficulties. A collaborative tool may only benefit your firm if it is accompanied by a solid plan.

Different types of collaborative working:

Collaboration in the workplace can be split into three categories:

1. Team collaboration

There is a definite group of people with specific tasks, goals, interdependencies, and timelines in team collaboration. The participants must effectively complete their interdependent tasks within the time restriction in order to attain the goals.

The majority of team collaborations necessitate coordination among all members as well as clear communication. A five-member marketing team is working together to launch a new marketing campaign in a month is an example of team collaboration. While each team member has a specific role to complete, they are all working together to ensure the campaign's success.

2. Community collaboration

Instead of completing a task, the purpose of community collaboration is to learn. Members join communities to exchange and gain expertise that they may subsequently use to solve problems in their teams. The time spans for community collaborations are frequently continuing or open. While most members of the community are on an equal footing, more experienced individuals may have a higher rank.

Tech conferences or meetings are an excellent example of community collaborations since they bring people from all over the world together to talk about the same technical difficulties they face every day.

3. Network collaboration

Network collaboration typically entails interactions between people who are geographically dispersed and primarily working independently, but whom all work together to achieve common goals.

Because this sort of collaboration is driven by the internet and social media, most participants do not know all of the other members personally. The timelines and memberships are both open-ended and unrestricted. These networks aid in the collection of data and knowledge.

Social media groups where users ask questions and other members help answer them are a fantastic example of network partnerships.

7 Reasons Why Collaboration Is Important

Collaboration as a practice becomes more crucial than ever when people's skill sets become more specialized. But what precisely does that imply? What is the definition of collaboration?

Although the term "collaboration" has become somewhat of a corporate buzzword, it is far from a cliche. Collaboration in the workplace, on the other hand, is what makes teamwork successful. That's all there is to it.

Collaboration occurs when a group of people gets together to exchange their knowledge and expertise in order to achieve a common goal, task, or mission. It could be a photographer collaborating with a designer on a cover image, or a technology team meeting with the marketing team on a regular basis to work on quarterly goals. In other arguments, collaboration is that the process of group work. It is, however, a learned skill.  Collaborating with others can be beneficial in producing superior website content writing.

Your company interacts in a variety of ways, and it does so on a regular basis (even now). In fact, collaboration has become so ingrained in the way people operate these days that we hardly realize it.

However, it's worthwhile to take a step back and assess how you and your teamwork. Why? Because well-coordinated firms are more likely to be financially successful, culturally connected, and have higher levels of employee engagement.

Now let us look at seven reasons why collaboration is so important.

1. It helps us in problem-solving

When you're stumped, what do you do? Say you've prepared tons of progress on your task, but you've encountered a barrier that seems to face up to everything you throw at it. You've run out of thoughts, development has come to a halt, and your deadline is approaching rapidly. Do you surrender?

No, you seek assistance or seek a different viewpoint. You may hold a brainstorming/whiteboarding session with your team or solicit feedback from a colleague. To put it another way, you work with your team to address the challenge at hand. When a bunch of people pools their information, skills, and expertise, then hash out problems and debate potential solutions, projects that have been stuck will begin to move forward again.

Collaboration, on the opposite hand, doesn't need to be a final choice. Collaboration should pervade your team's operations, it should be baked in. The more eyes on a project from the start, the better it's to identify issues and solve them.

2. Collaboration conveys persons and organizations closer together

If you see that certain teams in your business rarely contact each other, which teams and departments operate in silos, you ought to consider forming a mixed-skills team. These are usually impromptu groups that employ on projects that require a spread of skill sets and areas of experience.

A product engineer, a customer experience designer, a builder, and a copywriter, for example, might be in a mixed-skills team. It's effectively a replacement team formed to figure on a standard project for a specified length of your time. You've brought together individuals from three (or four) distinct teams, given them a similar goal, and established connections that will benefit you all in the future.

In summary, you've used collaboration to break down certain organizational barriers and strengthen departmental connections.

3. Collaboration helps people learn from one another

Learning from others' expertise is one of the best aspects of working collaboratively with people who have a variety of skill sets and backgrounds. Collaborating with group fellows or even different teams should be viewed as a learning opportunity, so make use of it.

This entails soliciting views and opinions, providing information, and observing how your teammates tackle their side of the project to develop a better understanding of how they work. Learning from colleagues isn't the only advantage of collaboration; it is also the primary step toward creating a learning and development-focused workplace culture.

Teams that collaborate not only learn from one another—their mistakes, achievements, failures, processes, and so on—but they also get a better knowledge of the other team's point of view. You get to listen to their side of the story: their problems, priorities, and even how they think. Which will be tremendously useful when you work together in the future.

4. It exposes new channels for communication

Working with new people from various departments inside your company also opens up channels that would otherwise be closed. Finding innovative ways to interact and exchange information is critical to a company's success, which is why collaboration should be used to establish relationships between departments whenever possible.

"Maintaining regular, direct communication with team members helps you get crucial insights into the operations of every department and be able to resolve challenges quickly," according to David Hassel, thus having a more cohesive, open workplace is beneficial to everyone. Furthermore, it draws everyone a little closer together and clarifies your organization's main objective.

Many collaborative platforms, such as an intranet, do this. They're planned to essentially open up your business in order that all regions of the organization can communicate with one another and keep tabs on what other teams are performing on through news updates, announcements, events, discussions channels, you name it.

5. Collaboration boosts morale across your organization

People will automatically engage each other more as connections are created between teams and departments, which will progressively increase the mood of the entire firm. After all, if there is a lack of trust and low morale in an organization, it will fail. Working with people outside of your team or department on a regular basis is one of the most effective methods to develop trust.

This also works in the opposite: the superior your company's confidence, the more likely your employees will feel at ease working with colleagues from different divisions. This appeals to high performers, who are increasingly looking for workplaces that are more open and participatory.

6. It leads to a better rate of retention

Collaboration appeals to future and present employees because it creates the foundation for a more open, connected, and engaged workplace—perhaps even more so than firms that are siloed and separated. Your employees will value an environment that prioritizes teamwork, and it will go a long way toward keeping them from seeking work elsewhere.

People value connection, especially in the workplace. We want to engage with people we can believe, who understand and appreciate our points of view, and who work well with others, especially those from different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Simply, collaboration allows this to happen.

7. Collaboration makes us more efficient workers

Working independently has many benefits. We can focus entirely on one job without worrying about how much time we'll waste if we get sidetracked or how to assemble a team in time to meet a tight deadline. If the task at hand necessitates independence, then go for it.

Collaboration, on the other hand, is simply more efficient for many kinds of projects. We must be able to recognize to ourselves that we will require assistance when the endeavor is complex and demanding. It'll have to be a collaborative effort. This is when collaboration comes into play. It aids in the division of a large workload, the development of innovative solutions to difficult challenges, and the comprehension of the big picture.

An organization that prioritizes collaboration as a core value will ultimately normalize this way of working, resulting in a more efficient and appealing workplace.

Don't worry if this doesn't apply to your company. It takes time and effort to create a collaborative workplace, but the return is well worth it. Start with new hires to get the process started at your company. Find methods to get them out of their team, out of their comfort zone, and into new situations. Give them projects that necessitate collaboration. Your company will gradually come to understand why teamwork is so crucial.