Effective collaboration in the workplace is essential for achieving organizational goals and creating a positive working environment and culture. Employees want to work in collaborative environments, and your duty as an employer is to implement strategies to make your workplaces as collaborative as possible so your organization benefits from a motivated and engaged workforce.
This article discusses the benefits of collaboration in more detail, provides some top tips on how to improve team collaboration at work, and explains how these can be implemented in your organization for maximum impact.
What is team collaboration?
Team collaboration is how people in your organization work together to ensure that common goals and purposes are kept top of mind. It can include effective communication, problem-solving and synergy.
Team collaboration can bring many benefits to individuals and the wider organization, and as such, it is an important part of every company’s culture.
Why is it important for business?
Team collaboration can impact organizations in many different and diverse ways.
Firstly, it results in employees pooling their collective talents, skills and perspectives, meaning that they benefit from improved problem-solving and creativity. The added benefit of this is that teams can become more agile, which contributes positively to competitive advantage.
Collaboration also links to effective communication, meaning that goals can be openly and clearly discussed and conflicts can be resolved before they become too disruptive. This can, in turn, increase employee engagement and job satisfaction.
Finally, effective team collaboration keeps all employees focused on the organization’s purpose and mission. Employees know what they’re working towards, and this can create a more cohesive organizational culture, something that can be marketed to candidates and evidenced in strong financial results.
Ultimately, effective team collaboration has no downsides and can be a powerful attribute that can set your organization apart from its competition.
How to improve team collaboration
Promoting team collaboration is important, and the good news is that there are plenty of ways to do this. Take some time to diagnose what is needed in your organization, and use the following strategies to implement a team collaboration plan that brings your people together.
1. Define clear goals
Setting clear goals ensures that your team has direction and how they can contribute to the organizational mission. Leaders can effectively define goals by establishing organizational key performance indicators and cascading these into SMART goals for their team.
Providing direction and support for completing the goals is vital as, this way, your team can reach out to you if the goal is confusing or unattainable for some reason. Similarly, communicate daily actions, such as ad-hoc projects, to everyone in your team so that everyone receives the same information in the same way.
2. Celebrate success
Teams that celebrate together will feel a sense of collective accomplishment and pride when they achieve something positive. It’s easy for leaders to overlook these moments, but in reality, they’re a powerful and easy way to drive team collaboration.
You can do this by implementing recognition in team meetings and huddles, providing ad-hoc or surprise moments where you celebrate something with the team, and establishing a culture of personal celebration, where events like birthdays, service anniversaries and promotions are consistently recognized.
3. Define roles and responsibilities
Defining roles and responsibilities ensures that your team can get on with their job, seek support from the right people, and minimize conflicts arising through asking people to do tasks that are not theirs to do.
Leaders can define roles and responsibilities through setting clear task lists and job descriptions. This is completed only after mapping out all the tasks a team is meant to do to ensure that nothing is overlooked.
Understand what your individual team members enjoy doing and, where possible, assign them roles and responsibilities based on their interests and strengths.
4. Schedule regular check-ins
Regular check-ins and one-to-ones are a good way to see how your team is getting on and to identify, triage and fix any challenges before they become larger and more disruptive. Leaders should meet regularly with their individual employees to give them a safe space to let you know their opinions about team dynamics.
Similarly, meet with your collective team regularly — for example, in team meetings and daily huddles. This gives you an opportunity to set daily tasks, ensure the team is focused on the same mission, and clear up any confusion or action points that might have arisen before the meeting or in your team one-to-ones.
5. Foster friendships
Friendly teams will collaborate brilliantly. This is because they’ll be closer and find it easier to communicate openly through sharing constructive feedback and challenges, working through conflict and trusting each other to do the right thing.
Of course, leaders can’t force their teams to be friends, but they can help. This includes fostering open communication to drive trust and conflict resolution, empowering teams to stand on their own two feet, providing socialization opportunities such as team events, or setting up a fun breakout area.
6. Share knowledge and resources
By sharing knowledge and resources, and encouraging your team to do the same, they will be more empowered and able to work independently. This drives collaboration through team members training each other on information and tasks, and driving a culture whose collective strength is more than the sum of its parts.
Leaders can establish this culture by leading by example and sharing knowledge themselves, meeting with the team to ascertain what they need, and implementing a team training roster.
7. Use better collaboration tools
Investing in technology is a great way to improve team collaboration. These systems take away a lot of the manual labor that goes into great teamwork, such as scheduling tasks and meetings, organizing work, and streamlining communication channels.
Some collaboration tools can be quite expensive, but if you’re seeking powerful ways to improve collaboration in the workplace, then you should really consider investing in one. Research the different collaboration tools on offer, and find one that is closely aligned to your needs and fits your budget.
8. Lead by example
Another powerful way to improve collaboration in the workplace is to lead from the front when collaborating with others yourself. Employees will follow the leader in more ways than one, and if they see their leader communicating openly, such as ensuring meetings are happening, and engaging with their team, this will encourage them to do the same.
Conversely, leaders who don’t walk the talk will unwittingly demonstrate to their team that collaboration isn’t important, and their people will be unlikely to follow suit.
9. Encourage open and constructive feedback
Encouraging open and constructive feedback improves collaboration through encouraging healthy conflict and discourse, and developing trust between colleagues. Open and constructive feedback can be ingrained through a transparent and two-way appraisal process, where team members give feedback to their manager and organization.
Creating a culture of open communication and training in conflict resolution will get team members comfortable with sharing opinions and feedback with each other. Leaders should gradually develop this culture by praising in public and giving constructive feedback in private.
10. Inspire team engagement
Teams that are engaged are much more likely to collaborate with each other. Develop a culture of engagement through ensuring open and honest communication, providing space to relax and socialize, and promoting healthy working habits. Essentially, you want to provide your employees with the space and comfort needed to naturally engage with others.
Engagement also ties in with employee loyalty, so take time to analyze your retention metrics and understand what keeps people in their jobs and what might take them away. Measure this through engagement surveys, and factor in specific questions about collaboration feedback too.
11. Foster creativity
The process of thinking up new ideas, innovating and brainstorming naturally develops collaborative abilities that are fun and also contribute to your organization’s health. Creativity can be nurtured in your teams through mixing departments up and creating a storm of ideas through different viewpoints and perspectives. It’s also important to provide space for people to create by developing an open and honest work environment.
Finally, establish a culture of open discourse and feedback to help people understand that no question is a silly question, and that teams can get together to happily discuss any idea that might benefit the organization.
12. Introduce team-building games
Team-building games essentially train collaborative ability. They’re designed to bring people together and push them out of their comfort zones. Doing this levels the playing field and gets employees working together to achieve something new or unusual.
Leaders can implement team-building exercises simply, easily and quickly. They can be used at the start of a meeting, such as a five-minute problem-solving case study, or they can be incorporated into broader team training days.
Ultimately, the idea is to get people thinking differently, working with people they normally wouldn’t, and focusing on the collaborative aspect of the exercise — not necessarily what’s right or wrong.
13. Set expectations
As a leader, it’s important to set norms and expectations for your team in terms of collaboration. These can include how to behave in the workplace, timelines on responding to questions, how to welcome a new joiner, and other behaviors that directly impact collaboration.
Hold your team accountable for these norms by making the creation of them a collaborative activity in its own right. Allow your team to set and agree upon their team norms, and once finalized, display them prominently and follow them yourself to ensure they’re sustained.
14. Build a diverse team
Diverse teams bring different viewpoints and ways of working. This enriches collaboration through the healthy sharing of ideas, trying new things, and learning new behaviors or skills. Diverse teams can be made up of people from different departments, demographics or geographical locations.
Leaders should look for opportunities to do this, such as breaking down organizational silos, incorporating DEI into hiring practices, or implementing flexible working and remote teams. They should allow the team time to gel and resolve initial conflicts before the benefits are truly realized.
15. Socialize outside the workplace
External socialization can increase collaboration through allowing people to speak and talk freely away from a work setting. In a location such as a restaurant or a park, everyone is on neutral ground and hopefully relaxed and enjoying themselves. They will learn new things about their colleagues by talking about topics other than work.
This builds trust and stimulates the creation of friendships, other factors that can increase team collaboration. Give employees the space to organize external meetings themselves, but if you do it yourself, find somewhere everyone wants to be.
Final thoughts
We have discovered that there are no limits to the ways that you can increase collaboration in the workplace. Your role is to develop a strategy that works well for what your organization needs.
Whether your team requires a more “ground-up” approach to collaboration or a simple fix or patch in one area, such as finding a new team collaboration tool or implementing one-to-ones, the most important thing is that you’ve identified what is needed, and work on this diligently for maximum impact.
Make improvement in collaboration part of your organizational employee engagement strategy to truly reap the benefits of what effective collaboration in the workplace can achieve.
Got a question or any other ideas? Let us know in the comments section below.
This article is a complete update of an earlier version originally published on November 8, 2018.