Collaboration is nothing new and most organizations today understand the importance of teamwork and departments and business partners working together to reach mutual goals. More and more often the adoption of collaboration tools and strategies is driven by the fact that millennials now make up over 50% of the current workforce and are traditionally the biggest champions of collaborative work environments. Although collaboration is seen as an essential element within today’s business culture many companies still lack the key components to drive change.
- Don’t throw technology at a people problem
- Sharing of knowledge requires a mindset shift, don’t force this change TEACH it!
- Celebrate collaboration success stories demonstrating productivity and value gained compared to doing it the old way.
- Create procedures and policies that allow digital dinosaurs and digital natives to meet in the middle.
- Incentivize managers to redefine workflow and key performance indicators to include collaboration tasks and goals.
- Create a culture of collaboration by including collaboration practices in everyday tasks such as meetings, group messaging, conference calls, document sharing and company-wide announcements.
- K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) adoption of collaboration tools must focus on simplification of basic tasks as the mindset shift is massive therefore the technology must increase productivity not add steps or time.
- Establish an emotional intelligence baseline as with increased transparency and trust comes more exposure of mistakes therefore everyone on the team must understand the proper way to encourage continued collaboration after mistakes are exposed.
- Define collaboration long term goals but include short term wins that allow for group validation to motivate and inspire the team both inward and outward.
- Re-evaluate tools and technology on a regular basis as today’s collaboration tools are now growing beyond a singular SaaS based solution to include artificial intelligence, hardware integration.
I broke down collaboration in more details on a recent FOMOFanz Podcast episode you can listen to here:
This was first posted on my website: https://www.isocialfanz.com/10-keys-achieve-collaboration-success-collaborationhacks/
