‘Collaboration’ has very much become the buzzword for the modern workplace. Digital collaboration tools curate our working days, whether it’s the extensive suite of team-focused project management software offered as part of the Microsoft 365 package or the endless online tools – Trello, Wrike, Monday.com, Miro, and Figma, to name a few. It’s even entered the vocabulary of the digital spaces we inhabit outside the workplace. Instagram is increasingly encouraging us to ‘collaborate’ with our friends on posts, while artists on Spotify are harnessing the power of creative collaboration to help them reach wider audiences.
There have never been so many opportunities to collaborate, from email and instant messaging to social media, team project management tools, and ever more intelligent conferencing facilities, but do all these options for collaboration actually make us better collaborators?
Collaboration in the Workplace
The practice of workplace collaboration refers to two or more people working together to achieve a specific shared goal. While opportunities to collaborate are abundant, recent studies have suggested that they are not always productive or fruitful, and may even lead to ‘collaboration overload’.
Collaboration overload – or collaborative congestion – is where individuals within an organisation earn a reputation for their propensity for collaboration and find themselves in disproportionately high demand. This can lead to them underperforming because they are overwhelmed with requests.
The Harvard Business Review found that 60% of employees at a Fortune 500 company wanted to spend less time responding to ad hoc collaboration requests, yet 40% wanted to spend more time on training, coaching and mentoring – things that we might reasonably include within a much broader definition of collaboration. Once their contributions were reframed in this manner, employees were found to be less prone to stress and disengagement. This suggests that the manner in which we collaborate can have a profound impact on the efficacy of that collaboration. When carefully structured, it can be fruitful and rewarding, but when deployed in an on-demand paradigm, it can lead to underperformance and disengagement.
So how do we implement collaboration in the workplace in a manner that inspires positive relationships, progressive teamwork, and job satisfaction?
How to Get Your Teams Working Together to Collaborate Effectively
When we consider how to encourage collaboration, it is unfortunately not as simple as arming our teams with unlimited supplies of post-it notes and flipchart paper. In this section we’ll consider some of the strategies that underpin collaborative organisations.
Effective Team Leaders
During their analysis of the qualities required for successful collaboration, the Harvard Business Review found that the team characteristics sought after for challenging project work – large, virtual, diverse and composed of highly educated specialists – were paradoxically the same that undermined effective collaboration. They proposed a number of solutions for overcoming difficult collaborative dynamics, but perhaps the most interesting is the role of the team leader.
Their research showed that the most productive and innovative teams were led by task- and relationship-oriented people. Knowledge-sharing is one of the hardest hurdles to overcome in a complex group dynamic, and employees working in a team with positive amounts of trust and goodwill are more likely to feel comfortable enough to share that knowledge. However, the ability to provide clear objectives, focus and feedback is also essential for keeping projects on track.
Some of the most effective team leaders are those with a naturally collaborative approach – those who share leadership roles with their team members, instilling everyone with a sense of ownership.
Company Mission and Leadership
As your internal communications colleagues will no doubt tell you, one of the key tenets to developing an engaged and collaborative workforce lies in the visibility of your senior leadership team. Having a transparent executive committee inspires trust and confidence in your workforce, but it’s not enough just to be visible. Your leadership must demonstrate the values that they espouse. This is where it’s useful to have a company mission statement or a strategy that you can keep referring back to, ensuring everyone is on the same page and pursuing a shared set of goals.
Transparent leadership can be achieved through the periodic publication of blogs by executive staff, demonstrating what they’ve been working on and how junior colleagues’ contributions have helped achieve their goals. Video addresses (scheduled or ad-hoc video calls) are an alternative option, and if your company is co-located, they can even offer regular open-door office hours where anyone in the business is welcome to talk to them about an idea or concern. This transparency facilitates team collaboration as individuals can see the value of their work and gain a shared understanding of what they’re trying to achieve as part of an organisation.
Shared Knowledge Banks
At the beginning of this article, we discussed the impact of collaborative overload, and one of the primary contributors to this phenomenon is the request to share personal expertise. This may look like an invite to a meeting, or a request to talk a colleague through a process that may be relatively routine for the person giving the advice. These types of requests can be a significant drain on resources and contribute to fatigue and disengagement on the part of the advisor.
It’s therefore worth investing in the creation of knowledge banks, where colleagues can detail processes or the answers to questions that they are commonly asked. Not only does this free up their time to deal with more complex problems, but it also helps to upskill the workforce. Building knowledge banks can be resource intensive in the short term, but in the long term it will bring efficiencies to your work and protect inter-colleague relationships. Such banks are also essential for business continuity and are especially useful if your workforce is distributed across multiple sites or time zones. Just remember that they’re only effective when reviewed and updated on a regular basis.
Personality Types and Physical Spaces
In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Won’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes, “We… need to create settings in which people are free to circulate in a shifting kaleidoscope of interactions, and to disappear into their private workspaces when they want to focus or simply be alone”. Her research suggests that the archetypal modern workplace is designed to cater to specific personality types and so impedes the contributions of those who do not display those characteristics. Open plan offices, for example, are creative, collaborative spaces for those who crave stimulation but do not elicit the most effective collaborations from more introverted personality types who prefer quiet and solitude.
Psychologist and workplace strategist Dr Nigel Oseland agrees, writing in his 2012 paper, that collaborative spaces must consider how the design, layout, furniture and technology can support different styles of interaction. More importantly, he found that teams with a mix of personality types were most able to collaborate effectively.
It may seem counterintuitive, but their research suggests that the most effective collaboration doesn’t necessarily look like a group of colleagues sitting around a table engaged in stimulating conversation. For the best chance of success, you must ensure that your teams are composed of various personality types and that your physical spaces empower each individual within that team to perform at their best.
Team Exercises for Collaboration
Just like any skill, efficient team collaboration is rarely something that will occur without regular practice. To build a culture of collaboration in your workplace, you need to be regularly re-enforcing it, and there are few better ways to do this than through team-building activities. Many organisations will host an annual team-building day, but employing team-building activities on a regular basis, perhaps at the start of a monthly meeting, is much more optimal.
Team collaboration activities are best centred around problem solving exercises. These can be fun activities solely designed to improve team dynamics, or you can format them to have practical applications for your business. For example, you can choose a problem your organisation is facing and outline the obstacles it creates for your team. Challenge them to brainstorm potential solutions to the problem and then rank those solutions based on the number of advantages that each suggestion brings. Finally, you can ask your team to plot an implementation plan for that solution. Collaboration activities such as these take your team out of their normal working paradigms and challenge them to think creatively and cooperatively, analysing each other’s points of view and working together on a shared solution.
Team Collaboration Tools
Much research has been conducted into the efficacy of group collaboration, with varying results. For every study proclaiming group brainstorming to be a fruitless endeavour, there’s a study espousing its benefits.
What does seem to hold true is that different team collaboration styles have different merits. A Capstone Research project found that face-to-face collaboration elicited higher levels of creativity when compared to virtual collaboration, but the latter proved more productive for younger or less experienced team members who felt more comfortable expressing themselves. Clearly, there is no panacea for optimal groupthink conditions, but it’s important to give our teams access to collaboration tools that allow them to contribute in a way that elicits their best work; this is where hybrid working setups can have a huge advantage.
Hybrid Collaboration Activities
As we have seen, different personality types thrive in different environments – the physical world versus the online; busy offices versus quiet and solitude – and this is a challenge technology can help us overcome.
Equipping your workspace with an interactive display allows your teams to contribute in a manner that suits their respective idioms and empowers them to produce their best work. For those who prefer the stimulation of a busy office, interactive screens can be a great way to brainstorm ideas, annotate diagrams and share resources with others. Meanwhile, those who thrive in a quiet environment and perhaps feel more comfortable expressing themselves in the virtual domain can dial in remotely and contribute without missing what’s happening in the room.
This can also be a useful solution if teams are separated across multiple sites or time zones. Remember that technology can aid collaboration, but its impact will be limited if you haven’t nailed the team dynamics and strategies outlined earlier in this article.
How to Improve Collaboration
If you’re interested in finding out how Promethean’s interactive displays, software, and collaboration tools can help get your teams working together and empower them to collaborate effectively, book a free demo today.
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