If you didn’t know already, collaboration is now being taken seriously by every successful organisation.
Although some may find this hard to believe, the statistics back this up. One study has found that 75% of employers rate team work and collaboration as “very important.”
Why do they feel this way? Many will have seen the dire consequences of collaboration failing in their organisation.
However, the true reasons lie in the amazing collaboration benefits that soon become clear once they have adopted this smarter way of working.
Whether you’re working with external partners or just with colleagues within your team, in this blog post, we’re going to look at the key benefits in more detail.
Higher performance
Organisations are always trying to find new ways in which they can increase the performance of their staff.
Working collaboratively can certainly help with this. A joint study of 1100 companies found that companies that promoted collaborative working were 5 times as likely to be high performing. You certainly can’t argue with statistics like that!
Engages remote workers
Sitting alone at home doing work is perfectly fine for some people.
However, what about individuals who are more productive when working with other colleagues? If they don’t feel a connection with them, they will just feel isolated and ultimately demotivated to do their job.
Luckily, technology has helped to bridge this gap. Cloud collaboration software allows remote workers to work closely with their office-based colleagues whenever and wherever they want, through the use of shared calendars, task lists, document co-authoring and much more.
Builds trust
When talking about trust in the workplace, you’re probably thinking that I’m referring to the relationship between management and team members.
This is obviously important. However, when it comes to good collaboration, trust needs to go much further than that.
One study found that individuals would help someone else in exchange for a ‘token.’ This token would then be exchanged with someone else, when that particular person needed help. It ultimately became a symbol of trust between individuals and became a great way to encourage collaboration.
Encourages knowledge, good practice and information sharing
Trying to resolve a problem on your own can be tricky to say the least.
The reality is, you could be spending lots of wasted time trying to figure out the answer while someone else in your team or organisation already knows the solution. With one-third of employees taking up to 25 minutes to find the information that they’re looking for, you can see that this is a serious problem.
An obvious solution to this would be to use an intranet that can act as a centralised resource hub to you and your team.
At a basic level you can use this to upload documents and organise them into folders so they’re easily accessible.
But to take this a step further, you can use tools such as surveys and forums to actively encourage your team to raise issues and questions which can then be answered by someone in the community. These forum threads can then be stored on the intranet for future reference.
Forms a key part of your digital workplace
I am sure that you would have heard of the digital workplace by now.
If you haven’t, no problem. According to Gartner, the IT research and advisory company:
The Digital Workplace enables new, more effective ways of working; raises employee engagement and agility; and exploits consumer-oriented styles and technologies.
With 67% of organisations seeing an increase in productivity from the implementation of a digital workplace, it isn’t a surprise that this has taken off like it has.
But how does collaboration fit into this? The key phrase to pick out of Gartner’s description is employee engagement.
So, guess what’s a great way to engage your team members? That’s right – by encouraging them to collaborate with each other.
To enable this, you should be using online collaboration software. This is a solution that has helped local councils such as Havant Borough Council and major public sector organisations such as the MOD to engage stakeholders and provide a secure platform where collaboration can flourish.
Having one single secure platform to share ideas and work on documents together can help to create a sense of comradery amongst your stakeholders, which can be so hard to achieve in the age of remote working.
