Workplace collaboration often comes up in conversations to improve productivity and employee experience. We all collaborate in our daily roles; it's the nature of businesses and people, but why is it important to a business? And why can we never do it as effectively as we should?

Why is Collaborative Working Important?

Workplace collaboration is where employees work together towards a common goal. It involves sharing knowledge, skills and resources to achieve better outcomes with close colleagues across teams or departments. When done well, the benefits of workplace collaboration include:

Enhances creativity and innovation: diverse perspectives and collaborative brainstorming sessions can spark new ideas and innovative solutions.
Improves problem-solving: By working together, teams can quickly identify issues and develop more effective solutions.
Increases productivity: Collaboration streamlines workflows reduces errors and accelerates project timelines. A Stanford study found that being primed to act collaboratively led participants to work at their task 64% longer than their solitary peers, with higher success rates.¹
Boosts employee morale and engagement: A collaborative work environment fosters a sense of belonging and purpose, leading to higher job satisfaction. Participants from the
Standford study didn't just work at their task longer - they were more engaged and reported less fatigue than solitary peers, which lasted for several weeks. Employees know this too, with 89% of respondents believing that teamwork between departments and other business units is either important or very important to their overall job satisfaction, according to Statista.²
Strengthen team cohesion: Collaborative projects build trust, respect, and strong working relationships. Collaborative teams tend to be more strategic, bringing up their performance as a team, with collaborative teams 39% more likely to require meeting prework and 55% more likely to begin meetings with progress updates than their peers.³

All these factors help drive business growth: one study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity and Babson College found that companies promoting collaborative work were 5 times more likely to be high-performing.⁴

The Challenges of Effective Workplace Collaboration

Despite all these benefits, collaboration at work often goes wrong with significant effects. One report by Fierce Inc. found that 86% of respondents blame a lack of collaboration for workplace failures. Several factors can hinder effective workplace communication. These include:

Lack of Clarity: Ambiguous or highly technical can easily confuse colleagues, and information overload can overwhelm others, leading to more back-and-back that effective communication could cut in half.
Cultural Differences: language barriers, nuances in communication style and expectations, not to mention time zones, can all affect the ability to communicate and work together in global businesses
Technological Barriers: Collaborative technology requires careful balance. It must be sophisticated enough to support collaboration while effectively providing empathy and connection.
Emotional Barriers: emotions at work are a biggie; if people feel like they can't trust colleagues to work effectively, then collaboration breaks down, but supportive, hard-working colleagues that employees feel connected to make it easier to distribute and collaborate on work.
Organizational Structure: often responsible for negative emotions at work, hierarchical structures discourage open communication, and ambiguous roles lead to confusion and miscommunication on work. Lack of trust can be created from these or many other reasons, but this is one of the single biggest reasons collaboration stops being effective
Remote Work: As great as remote work is for employee engagement, it can make it difficult to build rapport and easily misunderstand digital communication.

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How to Improve Workplace Collaboration

Considering all this, taking active steps to improve collaboration in your organization is crucial to aid employee and business well-being. What this may include differs for every business, depending on your goals, current levels of collaboration, which issues affect your employees the most, and what kind of collaboration you want to encourage.

Collaboration can be broken down into team, community and network levels. Team collaboration includes a fixed group of members with clear goals who need to finish interdependent tasks on time to succeed, for example, a new product launch. Network collaboration is a little broader, where employees work autonomously but collaborate to achieve common goals, for example, answering general questions on your internal social or general messaging channel. Community collaboration is the broadest of all, generally learning rather than completing a task. People join communities to find solutions and knowledge that can help them with their day-to-day problems, with ongoing or very open timelines.

How you apply the following tips and what you need to encourage in your organization will depend on which of these types of collaboration you want to facilitate the most. Digital tools and business initiatives have their place in helping all these forms of collaboration. Still, things like community collaboration may also require you to think outside of your business as to how you can enable employees to connect and learn from experts in their industries.

Develop a Culture of Openness and Trust

Open communication, transparency, and honesty create conditions in which employee collaboration is much more likely. When employees feel comfortable sharing their ideas and thoughts, they can start more conversations that spark projects and momentum. This removes many of the contestants that organizational structures and emotional barriers put upon workers. Openness and trust also help to build stronger relationships between teams.

This kind of culture can be encouraged or actively built by offering training around active and passive listening and by organizing or enabling employees to organize their own team-building activities. As with any aspect of company culture, collaboration behaviours only become desirable when modelled by leadership at all organisational levels. Leaders can encourage their teams to work with others, especially if they can specifically signpost to others across the organization when projects need a boost, a different perspective or start to overlap with other people's roles and responsibilities. You can also encourage feedback through physical or digital means, such as comments or discussion posts on your company intranet or the good old suggestion box in the office.

Set Goals & Incentivize Meeting Them

Companies should offer bonuses and incentives for team achievements instead of just rewarding employees for their accomplishments. The idea is to decrease internal competition so employees don’t see their colleagues as rivals. Instead, they should see their team members as assets to combat external company competition.

Provide Training and Development

In addition to listening training, you can offer more concrete ways to improve collaboration by ensuring employees can access communication skills, teamwork, and problem-solving training. While many of us still think of training as taking place face-to-face, virtual training programs can be better here. This means employees can access it whenever they want to and go at their own pace, which approximately 58% of employees prefer.

Other concrete ways to encourage employee collaboration through development include setting up structured mentorship programs or randomised coffee chats. This enables employees across your organization who do not usually run into each other to meet, get to know each other and share thoughts or knowledge.

Empower Working Process Improvement

HR and Internal Comms can create a foundation for successful process improvement by fostering transparency and clear communication. This includes encouraging teams to develop clear guidelines and documentation and utilizing effective communication channels to disseminate information and updates. This enables employees to be less stressed in their day-to-day work and to collaborate more effectively.

Work with department leaders to define objectives and outcomes for process improvement projects. Ensuring that goals are well-articulated and understood by you can foster a shared sense of purpose and motivation. Additionally, assigning clear roles and responsibilities helps to create accountability and ownership within the team.

Finally, establishing realistic timelines and milestones is crucial for effective project management. By working with team leaders, HR and Internal Comms can help set achievable deadlines and track progress. Encouraging project management software empowers teams to efficiently manage tasks, collaborate effectively, and stay on track.

Leverage Technology

Technology plays a crucial role in fostering effective collaboration in today's workplace. Here's how digital solutions can significantly enhance teamwork and productivity:

Cloud-based tools like Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365 enable multiple colleagues to work on documents simultaneously, regardless of their physical location. Real-time collaboration like this allows teams to collaborate seamlessly on projects, boosting efficiency and reducing version control headaches. Additionally, cloud storage ensures everyone has access to the latest version of documents, reducing confusion.
Clear communication is the cornerstone of effective collaboration. Choosing the right communication tools can significantly enhance teamwork. Instant messaging platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams offer a dynamic and efficient way to exchange ideas, share updates, and brainstorm in real-time. By centralizing communication, these tools reduce email clutter and improve responsiveness. Additionally, video conferencing can foster stronger connections and facilitate real-time collaboration, especially for remote or geographically dispersed teams. You can create a more connected and engaged work environment by selecting tools that align with your team's specific needs and preferences.
Remembering that technology is a tool, not a replacement, for clear communication and strategy is important. Setting clear goals, assigning roles, and choosing the right tools are all necessary, along with leveraging digital solutions. Organizations can create a truly collaborative and successful work environment by combining a focus on teamwork with the power of technology.

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Akumina’s Employee Collaboration Software: A Catalyst for Success

Organizations often turn to intranets as employee collaboration software to bring effective collaboration into their organization. A good intranet provides a centralized platform for teams to communicate, share files, and work together on projects, regardless of location. Some of the essential intranet elements we incorporate into Akumina platforms to ensure they facilitate workplace collaboration for our clients include:

Real-time communication: Instant messaging, video conferencing and voice calls are all needed for timely, seamless communication. We centralize notifications and action items, bringing information from across systems into one Activity Stream personalized to each employee.
Co-authoring: Edit and create intranet content in collaboration with colleagues, speeding up production as content moves seamlessly through users in programmed approval workflows.
Document sharing: Akumina integrates with hundreds of systems, so employees can quickly access documents and share ideas and knowledge.
Task and communication management: Activity Streams help teams stay organized with project updates and important announcements. Communication teams and project managers can track who is opening notifications and who still hasn’t viewed the information.
Personalization: Our Persona Builder ensures employees don’t hit information overload. Whether it be different job levels, functions, or departments, the right content can be shown to the right employees at the right time to improve employee engagement.
Hundreds of seamless integrations: Enable employees to work productively by linking account permissions across email, calendar, CRM, and other systems so they can access all of their applications from one screen in their digital workplace.