As companies become more global and complex, most of the work is increasingly team-based. A study published in Harvard Business Review1 revealed that “the time that managers and employees spend on collaborative activities has skyrocketed 50 percent or more” over the past two decades. The same study revealed that, in many companies, an employee spends more than three-quarters of the day communicating with colleagues. For example, according to research published in Harvard Business Review3, teams often benefit from having a mix of cosmopolitan and local members.
These are people who have lived in several countries and speak several languages and people with deep roots in the area in which they work. One is to have meetings only when necessary. Virtual collaboration is great, but everyone has heard of the exhaustion of videos due to the pandemic. By choosing your meetings wisely, you can improve collaboration and efficiency.
People need to feel safe to give and receive genuinely constructive feedback, be inspired by a common goal, and have the tools and opportunities to connect. This can only happen in a trusting environment where employees feel that their teammates and leaders have their interests in mind. Every member of the team has an important role to play. However, collaboration can be interrupted when one or more people feel that they have it more difficult than others or feel that other members of the team are trying to put an end to them.
The more you know your colleagues and understand how they work and what challenges they face, the more likely you are to collaborate with them successfully. Learn about empathy exercises you can try with your team. Trust us: Mastering these five collaboration skills will make working as a team much easier and more effective. When you work with a team, everyone should understand the purpose and vision behind the project, as well as how you will determine success.
Establishing transparency from the start builds trust and helps ensure that everyone is committed to success and aligned with a common purpose. Sometimes, problems arise and people make mistakes. When problems arise, remember to calmly analyze the problem in a group, without blaming any one person. Instead, focus your energy on working together to find solutions.
This helps build trust between team members and ensures that everyone feels comfortable communicating and being transparent with each other, even if they do something wrong. For 20 years, we have been developing our own set of principles to guide our collaboration with different communities, industries and sectors. The principle of honest inclusion means involving everyone who may have an interest in the project or topic in question. That's why we have a 24-hour rule in Business Lab.
Our goal is to provide a workshop report, summary or next step within 24 hours to our community of interest, even for the most complex projects. We often receive emails from people who say how grateful they were for receiving them so soon. It is clear from the correspondence we receive that it is key to attract people to the trip. That's why Considered Communication is a key principle for any collaborative or engaging work.
That's why we believe in the principle of action from day one. People need to see the quick gains of any collaborative process, or they'll lose faith and move on to something else. For us, this principle is to reduce your focus to a small number of collaboration opportunities. We often see organizations go through a planning process that results in 20 or more ideas.
These are all reasonably good ideas. So where do you start? Also, feel free to take our principles and make them your own. You can rephrase them in your language. Perhaps Honest Inclusion could become “whakawhanaugatanga”, the Maori concept of building trust and connections.
Or the action from day one could be “learning by doing” or “prototyping instead of planning.”. .
