These days, collaboration is everywhere and anywhere. And that’s a great thing. Especially when you know that companies could gain $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value if they improved their communication and collaboration skills (according to a McKinsey study).
It’s easy to want a collaborative environment, but it’s harder to actually make it work in the long term. That’s why we’ve put together four easy steps you could take today to start walking in the right direction. Here they are:
1. Create the right opportunities for conversations and collaboration in your team
Collaboration is nothing more than conversations between people to reach a common goal. This means that if you want people to collaborate more in your company, you need to create opportunities for them to meet and exchange, in both a formal and informal manner.
Setting a time and place for people to talk and share ideas, like team lunches or casual events, is a good way to make sure that your employees are actually communicating with each other. The end goal here is for people to learn from each other and feel comfortable reaching out to anyone around them with ideas, questions, and comments.
During these conversations, people from different teams might realize that they could help each other out in ways they wouldn’t have thought otherwise, improving productivity, creativity, and motivation throughout your teams.
The team at Evernote actually pushed this concept even further. They have their entire top management team take turns at the office’s coffee shop making drinks for everyone. The weekly schedule is shared so that everyone can have a chance of catching up with any top management over a drink.
2. Make information available to everyone, everywhere
According to a study by Socialtext, employees spend up to 25 percent of their day looking for information. This means that you’re probably wasting 25 percent of your staff cost just because you’re not making it easy enough for your teams to find what they’re looking for, when they’re looking for it.
Making information available to anyone is all about using the right tools or the right processes. Companies like Buffer and Stripe, for example, resort to fully transparent emails to make sure that everyone in their teams has the ability to stay in the loop if they want to. And all information is just a search away. Here at Front, our own app obviously lets us track down information and share it while working together in the same inbox.
Other apps like Trello, Asana or Slack (amongst others) are great ways to relay important messages, give visibility to your team on different subjects, and get different streams of information available to anyone without cluttering their inboxes.
3. Push your employees to work outside of their job description
Just like having lunch and coffee together can push people to exchange on the things they’re working on in an informal manner, actually encouraging people from different teams to work together outside of their job descriptions can be really beneficial to them, the team, and your company.
This means getting people from your customer support team to sit down on product meetings to give new insights. Or have your sales team give feedback on the new design you’re releasing. Or maybe even ask your engineers sit down with your marketing team to see if they couldn’t work on an interesting plug-in for acquisition.
Bringing different people outside of their usual context to work on projects that aren’t usually in their reach will definitely spark creativity and push innovation and collaboration forward.
4. Don’t go too fast, too strong
Collaboration is a tricky matter. In most cases, you need to have your entire team on board with you to make it work. And it means that you need to convince each and every one of your team members to adopt whatever new habit you’re trying to implement by showing them what’s in it for them. If you try to make too many changes to your normal workflow too quickly, there’s a big risk people won’t be able to follow.
To do this, it might be a good idea to sit down with your team and work out together the best ways to integrate collaboration habits in your workflow, what kind of information they feel like they’re missing, and what’s the best way to give them access to new tools or new processes.
Wrapping up
In the end, adopting collaboration habits in your daily workflow is more than just about saving money. It’s about improving productivity, innovation, and motivation in your team. It’s about getting work done. And it’s about getting it done in the best possible way.
Like Henry Ford used to say, “coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”
What are the steps you’re taking towards a more collaborative workplace? Let us know in the comments.