Business Bites: Collaboration

When people collaborate, they take teamwork to the next level

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success,” Henry Ford

Collaboration is a good way to help your business develop and grow quickly. It’s based on establishing healthy communication with, and among, employees, who need to learn not to compete with one another, and results in increased productivity and better problem solving. The net effect is an improvement in the business’s overall performance.

In his article, ‘How to cooperate as a team’ member in a workplace‘, M.T. Wroblewski tells us: “Say what you will about running a small business, but it has a way of keeping you on your toes. Your words carry meaning, and people scrutinise and question your words, perhaps like never before. So if you’re preparing to launch a new initiative whose success will depend on your employees’ ability to cooperate and work as a team, you may wish to ponder if you want them to become collaborators, too“.

There is a pyramid – with cooperation (as a minimum expectation and foundation) on the bottom, teamwork in the middle, and collaboration on top:

• When people cooperate, they support each other’s goals. When the employees stop what they’re doing to help each other out, they cooperate
• When people work together as a team, they work on the same project but have different responsibilities – with a team leader guiding the overall effort to fulfil objectives and goal and resolving problems and conflicts. Team participants have to fulfil their roles but don’t have to share common values
• When people collaborate, they take teamwork to the next level because they have a higher level of engagement than traditional teamwork. Collaborators can settle issues and disputes without the leader’s mediation, as they share the same values. The team leader performs the function of guidance, acting more as an adviser rather than a controller

So, what benefits can you expect from improved cooperation and collaboration in your business?

Employees who know how to cooperate with their coworkers tend to:

• Have a positive attitude about their work
• Be more productive
• Focus on solutions, not problems
• Analyse the quality of their work to make improvements
• See the bigger picture and work hard to see it come to fruition
• Allow information to flow more freely by sharing knowledge and skills. This results in a more transparent, cross-functional process through which employees can reduce duplication of work

A plan of action for improved collaboration should include:

• Making cooperation and teamwork part of your business culture
• Reviewing the relative strengths and weaknesses of team members and assigning work accordingly
• Providing the resources and training employees need to succeed
• Clarifying roles and setting expectations
• Ensuring that all team members know exactly what each member is responsible for
• Conducting regular team-building activities, even if they’re solely for fun
• Establishing protocols for resolving conflicts quickly but fairly
• Collecting feedback often with an eye towards making team improvements

Of course, your own behaviours in modelling good, cooperative behaviour will help to advance your team cooperation goals.

A highly important point to be added to the above list is psychological safety:

• Create an environment where employees feel safe to express an opinion, even if it’s ‘unpopular’, as well as praise each other over work wins

Obstacles to collaboration and cooperation

These may include:

• Unclear goals
• Employees have been given a role for which they don’t have the skills or knowledge needed
• Lack of a decision-making process that is transparent to employees
• Top management not sticking to that process
• Disruption from meetings which can affect the employees’ productivity. Employees get distracted in the middle of the working process and it’s difficult to get the focus back after. That’s why it’s important to assess the actual need for a meeting and making sure they are meaningful and productive

In the Everhour blog, ‘Why collaboration is crucial for team success: key benefits’, we are told: “When shifting corporate culture towards collaborative teamwork, you may run into some challenges. Some employees that are accustomed to working in an old-fashioned style may get lost in new conditions. You need to provide them with support and introduce the changes slowly.

“Here is what you can do:

• Carefully select members for your team. Relationships in a team are defined by its team members, their working style, world outlook and temper. It’s hard to establish a collaborative spirit in a team whose members have totally different mindsets and views
• Have face-to-face conversations. Although digital communication tools greatly expand throughout offices, it’s still important to have individual conversations with your employees. Most of them are usually willing to share the difficulties they encounter, and you can help to resolve them during a private talk
• Teach your team the ‘disagree and commit’ principle. It states that every employee should be heard if they oppose any ideas. At the same time, once most of the team agree on any decision, each team member should commit to it, even if they aren’t entirely happy about it
• Make collaboration culture a prime goal of your company. Once you decide to establish collaborative rules, they should be applicable to the whole company, not a particular team. Collaboration principles have to become a strong company policy (with its leaders representing a role model for others) for the employees to follow and internalise the new culture of collaboration“

Remember: bad collaboration is much worse than no collaboration. The goal of collaboration is to achieve better results. When collaboration doesn’t lead to results and instead creates problems, it fails to serve its purpose. Therefore, for organisations to succeed, they must aim for good, disciplined collaboration and avoid the traps that turn it into a detrimental activity.