How to boost employee collaboration in the workplace
Boosting employee collaboration in the workplace can seem like a minefield in the current working climate. With an increasing number of companies adopting a flexible or fully remote working model, more than ever, employee collaboration has become a vital element for businesses to get right. Fortunately for managers, technology has equally transformed over time, allowing organizations to be more flexible and let employees work from home all over the globe.
From using Microsoft Teams to having a fully developed social intranet, having the right tools to manage employee collaboration can facilitate your work. However, aligning these assets to the tactics you’re trying to implement to encourage your workforce to adopt a collaborative behavior can still come with some challenges.
This article explores the importance of employee collaboration, but most importantly, we share our top tips on enhancing employee collaboration in the workplace through business goals, actionable tactics, and technology advancements.
Why is employee collaboration important?
There are several things organizations must have at the forefront of their priority list, and internal communications as a means to enable effective collaboration in the workplace is one of them. But why?
Employee collaboration is a crucial aspect of any company's success as it ensures everybody within a team works together to achieve a common business goal. Furthermore, collaboration plays a vital role in employee engagement as people in your workforce want to feel seen, heard, and capable of sharing their ideas and thoughts with their colleagues and within the organization. Whether it occurs in person or virtually through technologies such as cloud-based intranets, employee collaboration is undoubtedly an element that every organization must actively encourage and support to create a productive and healthy work environment.
Benefits of employee collaboration
Effective teamwork
As previously mentioned, good collaboration between employees leads to more effective teamwork. Moreover, collaborative working enables individuals to get to know each other and get more in sync with teammates by dealing with work challenges together and constantly encouraging one another to be more productive.
As large organizations nowadays tend to have multiple offices across the globe and offer flexibility with remote working, having solid means for internal collaboration has become more critical than ever to create stronger teams and better working relationships. Employing an internal communications platform for collaboration to evolve within a business can give your employees the flexibility to work better together, even from afar.
Innovative ideas
Successful employee collaboration enables team members to develop exciting and innovative ideas. Projects benefit from multiple perspectives, differing views and personalities create a dynamic working environment, and help to establish fresh ideas and innovative insights. Open communication around project status, successes and challenges will give employees the opportunity to share their thoughts with each other, which helps to create a dialogue that solves problems faster.
Knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing between employees should be encouraged in any organization. If employee collaboration is inaugurated into the business, skill-sharing should become a second nature within the team. Experts will arise within teams. These should be encouraged to coach others, teach new skills, and elevate the broader team. Developing knowledge within the team is a vital element to business success as it has the potential to underpin innovation and bring your organization to the next level.
Discover how Biogen, a world-leading neuroscience biotech company, uses Unily's employee experience platform to share knowledge across its 9k employees and promote innovation.
Top tips for successful workplace collaboration
#1. Break down silos
Encouraging collaboration between teams brings different perspectives together and initiates innovative ideas on work projects. Cross-department collaboration combines differing objectives, people types, and skillsets which can lead to effective idea generation. Influencing collaboration between different departments gives co-workers who would not usually work together visibility with one another and more communication opportunities, which, in turn, develops their working relationships.
As an example, internal communication software gives your employees the flexibility to communicate more efficiently with different departments.
#2. Implement the right technology
It is vital to utilize the right technology to support your internal collaboration strategy. Intranets are an efficient way of ensuring proficient collaboration between employees. They bring together all the tools that your employees use in one place for more efficiency, better collaboration, communication & higher productivity.
Implementing a cloud-based platform to facilitate employee collaboration can help your workforce develop original concepts together and underpin innovative work behavior. Unily offers an all-encompassing employee experience platform to encourage internal teamwork and boost collaboration within your business.
#3. Define and communicate goals
Good internal collaboration starts when leaders effectively define and communicate the organization's goals to employees. Having a good idea of the big picture brings departments and peers together towards common objectives. After all, when everyone involved in the company knows where they are heading, individuals start thinking more as a group, and that's when collaboration starts happening organically. Once that foundation is in place, you can then work on reinforcing this culture with the help of technologies and best practices.
Having engaged employees is a crucial success factor for any company. As workforces become dispersed, internal communicators must adapt their tactics and rely on technology to tackle modern workplace challenges.
Learn how to supercharge your internal comms with digital tools.
#4. Celebrate successful team collaboration
A good employee recognition strategy that aligns with the team collaboration culture you're trying to build can go a long way. Consider bringing gamification to the workplace to reward teams for excellent collaborative work and encourage this kind of behavior among your workforce. With Unily's intranet platform, you can implement reward badges to motivate your employees to collaborate more with one another.
#5. Lead from the top down
Leading by example is essential in any business. In other words, employee collaboration should be adopted by every staff member equally, including top management. This kind of open-door policy allows fluid communication between different organizational hierarchies and enables small business units to align their efforts better with the rest of the company.
#6. Encourage openness and transparency
Encouraging openness and transparency within your internal communications strategy is essential for employee collaboration. Being heard and valued within an organization is vital for a positive employee experience. Hence, promoting an open and transparent communication culture in your company will allow employees to communicate better with each other and their managers resulting in more employee collaboration.
Looking for tools to promote employee collaboration?
Reach out to our internal communications experts today to learn more about how Unily's next-gen intranet can help you boost collaboration in the workplace and support all your internal comms initiatives for better organizational alignment and employee experience.
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