Why employee collaboration is so important
Working together on projects or tasks is one of the best ways to get the most out of your staff. Carlo Pandian shares how collaboration can create a more enjoyable workplace but most of all great results.
How much thought or energy do you put into employee collaboration between the staff at your business?
If you are not focusing on employee collaboration, you might be missing out on a very important factor for business success.
A recent Gallup Organisation poll demonstrated that employees who have at least one strong collaborative relationship in the workplace will feel more fulfilled in their job than those without this type of relationship.
It makes a lot of sense that if you are working in a positive and collaborative way with someone else it will make you feel more motivated to come to work and to perform well.
However, these types of relationships don’t come out of thin air, they have to be built. It takes quite a while to fully develop a positive, trusting and collaborative relationship between employees. They are absolutely worth building though and they will bring many important benefits to the workplace as well as improving an employee’s morale.
Make the most of your employees strengths
When your employees learn to work together, they will form partnerships which complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. When two or more people collaborate together, each one will work on the tasks that they excel at and delegate the things that they are inefficient at to those who have a different more well-suited skill set. This means that the team can take advantage of everyone’s strong skills and accomplish more than they would have on their own.
When employees collaborate they can also share their skills and their knowledge with each other, which can help everyone to improve. They will be able to provide each other with feedback and offer each other support.
Your employees learn teamwork skills
When employees collaborate they also develop very important interpersonal skills and learn to work with people who have different habits and attitudes towards them. This might be one of the most difficult parts of the process, which means that you will need to offer employees support and coaching so that they can learn how to work together with each other in a respectful and productive way.
Collaboration can make work more fun
Collaboration also makes work a lot more fun for many people. Sometimes working on your own in a vacuum can be discouraging because you feel like you are not making a difference. Teaming up with others can make the work more engaging and can encourage employees to be more passionate about what they are doing and more eager to come to work in the morning and meet with their team.
How you can encourage collaboration
If you want to make collaboration a part of the culture in your workplace, there are many ways that you can encourage your employees to work together. Here are a few things that you can do which will encourage collaboration:
To make sure that your employees are working well together, try to team up people who have a common goal and who have strengths that complement each other. They should share a goal so that they will be both striving forward in the same direction.
Give them the time and the resources that they need to collaborate, such as a room for meetings and designated times for working on that specific project.
Make sure that your employees trust each other and are unselfish with each other. If you see behaviour which demonstrates that employees are being untrustworthy or negatively affecting the collaborative process, take them aside and coach them on how they can improve.
Supply your employees with whatever tools and technology that they need to make it easier for them to collaborate.
They should be able to communicate with the other people in their group quickly and easily as well as send information to each other.
These are just a few ways that you can encourage collaboration in your workplace. It can be difficult, but if it is implemented well then it can be extremely helpful and benefit your business in a number of ways.
Carlo Pandian is a business blogger interested in HR, finance and technology. He writes tutorials on payroll software by Intuit and provides advice for SMEs across several online communities in Australia.
