Collaboration is a key part of success in any workplace. Working together allows employees to share ideas, brainstorm, and more effectively find solutions. However, collaboration is not always easy to achieve; it requires clear communication, trust, and common goals. In a world where a lot of work takes place remotely, this can be difficult.
In order to boost productivity in today’s workplace, smart team collaboration needs to be at the center of your organization’s strategy. This uses technology and intelligent tools and techniques to allow your teams to work more efficiently, leading to better outcomes and productivity.
Digital collaboration tools are already widespread in the workplace, with almost 80% of employees using these resources. However, smart team collaboration is about creating an overall strategy that allows you to seamlessly integrate digital collaboration into your workplace.
Regardless of your industry or size, improving productivity in your workplace will doubtless be a key aim for your organization and smart team collaboration is one of the best ways to achieve this. Whether you’re a manager looking to improve collaboration among your team or an individual employee, read on to learn how smart team collaboration can help you achieve your goals and increase your productivity.
Why is team collaboration so important?
You might think that team collaboration is little more than team-building exercises and sharing daily emails. However, true team collaboration is about ensuring that everyone on your payroll is aligned and working towards the same goals. This means that you should encourage collaboration throughout your organization.
Here are three ways in which this collaboration can help you to boost productivity:
1) Fostering innovation
When team members work together, they each bring their unique experiences to the table. Rather than just relying on one perspective, this can help new ideas and approaches to grow. This means that your company is more likely to produce innovative ideas, which is critical for businesses that want to stay competitive.
2) Promoting employee growth
Team members will struggle to develop and learn if they work on their own. Sharing knowledge and expertise allows others to learn and grow. This will allow you to upskill your employees and produce a more knowledgeable workforce, boosting productivity as employees are able to work more effectively.
3) Building relationships
Finally, collaboration builds trust and strengthens relationships. Working together allows your employees to develop respect for each other. This can lead to stronger relationships, allowing team cohesion and productivity to improve.
How can you use smart team collaboration in your organization?
The benefits of team collaboration are clear for every company. However, a smart strategy is needed to encourage collaboration in a digital workplace. These tips will allow you to create a collaborative environment that makes the most of the technological advances of the modern workplace.
1) Communicate with your team
When creating a workplace environment that encourages collaboration, you should set the right example from the beginning. As clear communication is essential for effective team collaboration, you should ensure that you communicate why you are making any changes to employees’ workflows.
Start by defining the goals that you want to achieve by integrating more smart team collaboration into your organization. You should share this with your team members and regularly update them as you make progress towards your goals.
As well as this, it’s important that you encourage input from team members. If you already use employee self evaluations, you could add sections to include feedback on collaboration. As well as allowing you to find new ways that you could improve, this helps to create a collaborative environment where team members feel empowered to share their ideas and insights.
2) Create a collaborative environment
Once you have communicated the necessity for smart team collaboration to your employees, you need to build a collaborative working environment. You should make sure that team members are easily able to share their ideas and work together with their colleagues.
This can include setting up daily meetings where employees are encouraged to work together. If your team primarily works remotely, this can easily be done through online video calls. You should make sure that you set up your employees with VNC access so that they can access your resources from anywhere.
You should also set up team group chats. These are more informal than emails and can encourage employees to work with each other on simple tasks that they may have struggled with alone without the ease of communication through a messaging service.
Also read: 4 tips for effective remote team collaboration
Creating a collaborative environment is also about the culture that you want to establish in your workplace. Try assigning tasks that require collaboration and provide opportunities for team-building activities. You might even want to hire a virtual assistant to help manage tasks and streamline communication between team members. This will help your employees become increasingly accustomed to working collaboratively.
Beyond video calls and group chats, ensuring that you find the right tools for collaboration is a key part of smart team collaboration. There are numerous digital tools available to increase productivity through collaboration but it is important that you use the resources that are best suited for your company.
Also read: 20 collaborative tools to improve employee productivity
Project management software can be used for teams that are working together on complex tasks. These allow all team members to access deadlines and shared resources, while also making clear each member’s responsibilities and workloads.
Some tools are well-suited for most workplaces. You could use password-management tools to automate simple tasks like finding the right password and ensuring that everyone across your team can access the necessary data or software.
When looking for tools, you should make sure that they have intuitive interfaces and require minimal training. Similarly, it’s important that they comply with your organization’s security policies. This is especially important when sharing sensitive information or collaborating with external partners.
Once you have found the tools that suit the work done by your team and that are user-friendly and secure, your employees will need to be trained to use them effectively. However, all of this will ensure that your workplace is perfectly set up for smart team collaboration.
4) Encourage collaboration through rewards
Finally, a great way to encourage the continued growth of collaboration is through the use of incentives. Gamification is a fun way to motivate teams to work together. By introducing features such as points and leaderboards, team members can be encouraged to perform at higher levels.
Teams that perform well should be given rewards that continue to encourage collaboration. These can include fun group activities such as an away day. Ensuring that collaboration is rewarded through positive reinforcement is important if you want smart team collaboration to boost productivity in the long term.
Smart team collaboration – teamwork for the digital age
Collaboration is essential for any workplace to increase productivity and foster innovation. While digital collaboration tools are already prevalent in most businesses, creating a strategy that integrates digital collaboration into the workplace is crucial.
To encourage collaboration in a digital workplace, it is important to create a collaborative environment, communicate goals and foster a culture of communication and teamwork. Collaboration and project management software can help to increase productivity and collaboration while ensuring security and compliance with the organization’s policies. These tools can be further encouraged through incentives and rewards.
Smart team collaboration will be an invaluable part of most organizations as working remotely and digitally becomes more and more entrenched. Integrating it into your workplace now is a great way to boost productivity.
