Collaboration is one of the key ways of ensuring that a company works best and achieves its goals. By collaborating with your coworkers, you can do more than just your part to achieve a goal. Getting your employees to collaborate with each other can be an effective way to get more done at work, especially if you’re working on a project that requires multiple skills and/or has no clear-cut leader.
But how do you get employees who are used to working alone to actually work together? Here are some benefits of collaboration between employees, as well as some tips to improve your team’s teamwork.
Better Communication
Communication between employees is one of many factors that determine whether or not your business will be successful. When you work together to solve problems and achieve goals, it’s more likely you’ll enjoy greater productivity and higher profits in less time.
All of these factors combined make for a great incentive for employees to work well with each other; if everyone is on board with collaboration at work, both you and they will benefit from better communication.
So how can you ensure your employees want to collaborate—and get good results when they do? This is where tools like Microsoft Teams, which offer all-in-one communications, come in handy.
With Microsoft Teams, you can communicate with team members in real-time, share documents and get feedback, schedule meetings, and coordinate projects with clients. It’s more likely that your team will communicate quickly with each other if they can video call and instant message from the same app.
Less Time in Meetings
Have you ever had to sit through a thirty-minute meeting where you ended up spending more time looking at your watch than paying attention to what was going on in front of you? Or, maybe you’ve spent weeks—if not months—planning an event that hardly anyone attended.
Meetings and event planning can easily become a huge waste of employee time and resources. By focusing collaboration efforts on these activities, employees can save money and get back some much-needed work time.
To ensure employees are getting their jobs done, I recommend having weekly team meetings instead of daily ones. This will allow your team members to catch up with each other quickly over coffee rather than sitting around in meetings for ten minutes before or after their normal duties.
New Opportunities to Learn from Others
One of the benefits of collaboration between employees is that it can expand your skillset and make you a better-rounded employee. By collaborating with others on projects, you get to learn from their perspectives and experiences, which can help you grow as an individual and add to your existing knowledge base.
This will not only make you more valuable at work but also give you new opportunities for promotion in the future. Additionally, when you’re able to collaborate effectively with others outside of your usual circle of coworkers, it strengthens relationships within the workplace community.
When team members feel good about working together toward a common goal, they’re more likely to support one another in times of stress or setback—which leads to better overall morale.
Stronger Networking
When employees work together on a project, they form a stronger bond. Everyone involved in collaborating on a project develops trust and respect for one another, making it easier to collaborate in future endeavors.
Stronger relationships also mean better teamwork when projects or meetings arise; people already know each other, so there’s less of a learning curve when it comes to working with each other. Additionally, research shows that more collaborative teams are more productive than non-collaborative teams. This translates into higher revenues for companies with collaborative cultures.
So, although collaboration can take time away from individuals who have tight deadlines, many agree that more collaboration is worth it overall.
More Intimate Contact with Colleagues
A recent study found that when we collaborate with colleagues at work, our chances of developing feelings for them increase. Now, feelings don’t necessarily have to be romantic—but researchers found that when people feel a sense of closeness to their workmates (because they’re helping each other out or feeling empathy with one another), then they could build an emotional connection outside work.
However, if you want to keep things strictly professional, making sure you keep close boundaries between your personal and professional life is essential. There’s no need to stop seeing someone just because they share a cubicle; just make sure there are clear walls between home and work, even if those walls only exist in your head.
Better Sharing of Ideas and Resources
When you have an open and collaborative culture at work, your employees are more likely to share ideas and resources. They’ll also be better equipped to work together as a team; group projects get done more quickly and effectively when everyone pulls their weight.
Working with others leads to less duplication of effort and reduces errors—not only does it make for a smooth-running workplace, but it allows you to reap greater productivity overall. Why not put in place some collaboration techniques right now? At its core, collaboration is all about sharing knowledge… so why not encourage your employees to start doing just that!
Encourage them to step outside their comfort zones by developing brainstorming sessions where new working methods can be discussed. Make sure these sessions include lots of different people from different departments—employees who may not usually interact will often have great suggestions on how best to achieve goals and streamline processes.
Increased Overall Happiness
When you bring your team together for a meeting or happy hour, you’re helping to strengthen bonds between employees and improve overall happiness. Nothing is more fulfilling than working with people who enjoy spending time with you and collaborating can help make that happen.
Whether it’s going out to lunch with colleagues, getting coffee with friends after work, or taking a company trip together; hanging out one-on-one can go a long way in making employees feel connected to each other and their workplace as a whole.
As a bonus, collaboration has been shown to reduce levels of stress and fatigue among workers. We could all use a bit less stress! So give collaboration at work a try by adding some impromptu get-togethers into your schedule!
Blog Conclusion
It’s important to have a good working relationship with your team members. If you can’t stand the idea of working in an environment where collaboration is king, then this blog post isn’t for you.
Our hosted phone services allow employees to collaborate easily from anywhere, so they can stay focused on their jobs without worrying about missing calls or being away from the office for too long. If you’re interested in learning more about our hosted phone services, please feel free to contact us at any time.
