Effective Team Collaboration within Employees

Collaboration is similar to teamwork, but at the same time, it is different. Teamwork is two or more people physically coming together to complete a task. Guess what the definition for collaboration is? You guessed it – it is the same as teamwork. So where is the difference? The difference lies in the ‘how’ they achieve that goal:

Teamwork: usually involves a leader or team leader who would hand out tasks to team members according to their skills and knowledge and strengths.

Collaboration: The team work as equals, where each team member has the opportunity to share their knowledge and point of view. People work efficiently by sharing the workload equally and presenting a broadening of knowledge overall.

Collaboration takes one step further than teamwork by becoming a more productive way of doing things with the advancement of technology such as high-speed internet, video conferencing, file sharing and emails. With added help of CRM software to allow for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration proven to be more important than ever before especially during the Covid-19 pandemic days of working remotely. Although the working remotely seems like it is here to stay for some businesses. Where, when, and how we work seems to have radically changed. 

Effective team collaboration among employees, includes teamwork and a few more aspects such as working together towards a common goal, regardless of is they are remote working or at the office. Team meetings or problem solving shouldn't be an issue or get in the way of employee engagement even for remote teams. they should be able to share their good ideas with their colleagues easily. 

Brainstorming ideas for solutions: The expression "putting our heads together" could be perfect to explain this method of collaboration. This is where groups get together and offer their differing expertise and perspectives to solve common problems in real time. 

Sense of belonging involvement and purpose: There should be a meaningful reason as to why people get together, such as solving an issue which will benefit all those involved. Participants should also feel welcomed to be involved such that they know they are at the right place and can participate freely.

Equal participation: Participation by all levels from the ground up is welcomed in a collaborative workplace environment. Titles are left at the door, and everyone is given an equal opportunity and encouraged to express their perspectives and ideas on the topic at hand.

True collaboration is where communication meets action. If you are planning in one place and discussing in another and then deploying the action in another — where is the collaboration truly occurring? 

We need our business tools to keep up in today’s ever changing work environments and allow for our team members to be able to communicate and collaborate with ease. CloudOffix does just that. It offers your teams the opportunity to continue their collaboration without a glitch regardless of if they are working face to face or remote. 

Just as in any instance, ‘communication is key’ and the workplace is no different, if not even beneficial. Communication is key and the key is to build trust within a successful team.

There are many benefits to collaborating in the workplace. Let's look at some of those benefits in more detail. Some of these benefits are as follows:

Access to Skills and Strengths

When employees, departments, or even companies collaborate, they are able to utilize each others strengths and skills. When everyone shares their expertise, knowledge and abilities, challenges with a tasks can be overcome a lot smoother. Let’s take for example that one employee knows the ins and outs of a particular subject, and another has the skills to showcase a powerful presentation. Utilizing each others knowledge and skills, they can showcase presentation to impress. So, the more the merrier – the more people collaborating means more skills and knowledge shared.

Develop Employee Skills

As employees collaborate and share ideas from different departments and work together, they also get to see how others think, operate and just do things differently to their own operations. This gives people a better understanding of how other departments operate and can take the ideas, skills and knowledge onboard their own departments, which will in turn result in everyone developing for the better together.

Solve Problems and Innovate Faster

What may take you three months to solve on your own may only take three hours to solve in a collaborative workplace. Access to several employees with unique expertise and viewpoints will most likely allow you to come up with ideas and solutions that you may not have thought of on your own at a faster pace.

Work Efficiency

It’s no wonder why it is said ‘together we stand, divided we fall’. Trying to get things done alone will get you only so far, but if tasks are distributed so that everyone works to complete the bigger project, this will save an enormous amount of time and expenses. This strategy is often referred to as divide and conquer. Having a team of six or eight individuals each take a small part of a project they specialize in would could take a week to complete and would prove to be more efficient rather than having one or two people try to complete it in a month.

Improve collaboration among employees and minimize risks

Communicate regularly with your teams

As with many aspects in life, ‘communication is key’ when it comes to the workplace too. Communication is a pivotal point to achieve an effective collaborative work environment. This stimulates employee work engagement as well as feding off each others knowledge to make the best decisions. Not to mention avoiding duplicative work among peers.

Tracking employees progression:

• aids in identifying the development of employees involvement and task management.

• helps to understand if a member has any problems with the workload at hand.

• If and when necessary, allows the team the chance to correct progression of tasks.

• Guarantees almost flawless and timely completion of projects.

Use team-building activities

Team building activities will encourage employees to interact and associate with one and other and give them a chance to build teams that have stronger communications. This in the long run will lead to more efficient collaboration and therefore better team engagement.

Provide a collaborative work environment

To achieve effective collaborative work, teams simply working together is not enough. The environment in which they work, or, their workplace should be accommodating for employees to be fully engaged. 

Some ways this can be achieved are as follows:

• More open spaces

• Break down or minimize hierarchical barriers.

• Ensure the company structure is a horizontal, decompartmentalized structure rather than a vertical one.

• Install employee talking stations or social networking areas.

Use dedicated tools

Collaborative tools can help your team members become more aligned with each other. Offering spaces for better brainstorming, task tracking, goal settings, and overall collective work editing; while collaborating will enable a more efficient workload processing. Collaborating where the information lies, will simplify the way members work together.

Imagine a collaborative tool which offers your team members spaces for brainstorming, task tracking, goal setting and enabling them to flawlessly communicate through the whole process.

Some ways CloudOffix can help your business successfully collaborate, but not limited to are as follows:

1. Context Based Collaboration: You can colloborate where information exists.

2. Group Chat

3. One-to-one chat

4. Synchronized calendars

5. File sharing

6. Tagging team members in the chatter

7. Private communication within messages

8. Cloud based - which means you dont have to wait for version updates, as they occur instantly as they are deployed.