5 Great Resources to Learn About Teamwork & Collaboration
Most of you are certainly familiar with the concept of teamwork. It is a form of collaboration and is increasingly seen as a key to the success of a company or organisation. In business terms, collaboration can be defined as:
A cooperative arrangement in which two or more parties (which may or may not have any previous relationship) work jointly towards a common goal.
A considerable amount of research has been conducted to demonstrate how collaborative work influences our lives, especially on the workplace.
Recent studies have shown that the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has increased by over 50% and that communicating with colleagues takes up to three-quarters of an employee’s work day. This obviously has an impact on team management, performance, and distribution of work.
How does effective collaboration affect our teams, which are increasingly global, agile, digital, cross-disciplinary and organised in networks rather than hierarchies? How can we make the most out of teamwork and improve our happiness at work, our sense of accomplishment, and ultimately our lives?
These are all questions worth considering, regardless of the size of your company, the nature of your work or your office settings. Given the complexity of the topic, it is easy to get lost in the amount of data, research, and reading material available. That’s why we selected these great resources to reflect on the subject and help us to answer these questions.
1. The Secrets of Great Teamwork
Professor Mark Mortensen’s work focuses on the changing nature of collaboration. He believes that it takes more than technology alone to improve cooperation among increasingly fluid, interdependent and global teams. This article describes in detail four “enabling conditions” that managers and leaders should take into account to achieve great results: a compelling direction, a strong structure, a supportive context, and a shared mindset.
The authors also offer helpful advice on how to evaluate team performance and success based on three criteria: output, collaborative ability, and members’ individual development.
2. Next-level collaboration: the future of content and design
Taking as an example Pixar’s unconventional digital animation process, this article underlines the importance of creating a culture of openness at all levels (personal, company, global). In fact, it is a prerequisite for organisations that want to take their collaborative process up a notch and achieve outstanding results.
An interesting consequence of this openness is the idea that design, content and code are all equally essential and should not be experienced separately. Much like we do (have a look here), people at InVision promote a company culture that embraces ambiguity, encouraging team members to embark on a shared learning journey.
3. What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
If you work in software engineering and you prefer analysing data, charts and graphs over talking about feelings, you are going to find this story extremely helpful. Charles Duhigg, journalist and author of ‘‘The Power of Habit’’ and ‘‘Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Productivity in Life and Business”, describes in detail the research carried out at Google to understand which teams performed best and why. While you might not be surprised by the research findings, you will definitely reconsider the value of processes that cannot be optimised.
4. The new power of collaboration
This TED Talk was delivered in 2005, when collaborative work methodologies and tools were only starting to surface. Howard Rheingold was able to identify the beginning of a new era, one in which “cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role”.
The talks also raises some crucial questions that we are still struggling to answer today: What forms of suffering could be alleviated, what forms of wealth could be created if we knew more about cooperation?
5. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers
By now you should be aware of the importance of teamwork and collaboration to foster creativity, innovation and overall team happiness. If you still need a little inspiration to make things happen at your workplace, here you have over 80 ideas for Gamestorming activities. Which ones have you already tried and tested? Let us know!
We hope you enjoyed reading this. We would love to know what is your experience with collaborative activities, either remotely or in a shared office space. What works best for your team and why?
Give this article a 💚 and share your thoughts on the comments section — we are always up for a good conversation! For more stories, just hit that “follow” button.
