Why Collaboration is King: 10 Step Guide to Workplace Collaboration
Creating a collaborative workplace culture requires “a lot more than just knocking down walls and rolling out some whiteboards” says Catherine Conlan from Unleash Group. It’s a mindset.
Many organisations are struggling to understand how to change their culture to put collaboration at its heart. How can you build culture where trust, ideas, support and credit are freely given and received?
Here’s your 101 guide to developing a collaboration strategy that will help your team to re-imagine learning and make sharing part of the way you do business:
#1 Describe the business impact you want to achieve
If you google ‘collaboration’ you’ll find a host of information, articles books — and a long list to Ted Talks. Learn from the likes of Jimmy Wales how Wikipedia was first invented through the art of sharing to determine what impact you want to make through better collaboration.
#2 Decide who should lead the charge
Are there any teams already demonstrating great collaboration in your business? Tech teams, marketeers, and data folk are all used to the art of co-creating and of sharing problem-solving. Consider whether they could lead the charge and be your advocates for culture change.
#3 Assess the barriers
Look at potential barriers that might derail your collaborative efforts. In his book, “Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results”, Morten T. Hansen lists four barriers to collaboration:
- The not-invented-here barrier (we don’t reach out to others)
- The hoarding barrier (we keep things to ourselves)
- The search barrier (we can’t find what we need anywhere)
- The transfer barrier (we only work with people we know well)
#4 Encourage organic learning
Typically learning is the focus for HR or L&D but in a collaborative organisation these teams need to be comfortable in releasing control and allowing knowledge sharing to develop organically. According to Forbes’ tips for collaborative leadership,
“Leaders demonstrate their trust in employees by the open, candid, and ongoing communication that is the foundation of informed collaboration. A significant shift-change from the controlled environment typically managed in siloed or meritocratic organisations.”
#5 Embed collaboration in L&D
80 percent of learning is informal according to Bersin by Deloitte. This means that mentoring and sharing can empower learning in ways that training courses, employee handbooks and the intranet cannot. Peer-to-peer learning puts people on a much steeper learning curve and is a refreshing change to the “hundreds of courses, books, articles, videos, and many other artefacts of learning” typically found in L&D.
#6 Build levels of trust
Wise words as ever from Forbes, in their 8 top tips for building a collaborative workforce: “Trust is the belief or confidence that one party has in the reliability, integrity and honesty of another party….It is also the glue that holds together any group.” Our recent work with Hilton Hotels shows how the activity of collaboration is building increased levels of trust amongst employees.
#7 Know when Collaboration isn’t appropriate!
Deciding when to collaborate, and when not to, is the first step in ‘disciplined collaboration’ according to Morten T Hansen. Collaboration without a clear framework can create chaos. Hence, it’s critical to set clear accountabilities and to instil the “willingness and the ability to collaborate when required” to ensure collaboration generates results.
#8 Fans, champions and advocates
Since trust, ideas, support and credit are central to a learning culture it’s important to recognise your collaborative champions and advocates. In our recent work with DIA Group we identified ‘experts’ who could provide advice and recommendations to colleagues and customers. Colleagues could rate the experience they had in dealing with the experts.
#9 Calculate the cost of a knowledge culture
“The true goal of collaboration is not to get people to work together but to generate better results” says Morten T Hansen. Sharing intellectual contribution, problem-solving and solutions, reduces the cost of duplicated resource and effort. Plus, the human value — a sense of inclusion, consultation and connection can also ultimately lead to financial gain.
#10 Pay it Forward
“A great collaborative culture creates an environment where folks want to help one another and want to create that ‘communal brain,’ where good individual ideas are turned into collective intelligence,” says Thea Spitzer, author of ”The Power of Collaboration”. Sharing your knowledge is great for the organisation and the individual — successful people enjoy the feeling of paying it forward.
If you’d like to learn more about embedding collaboration into your workforce culture, building the business case, and using technology to help you — reach out! It’s good to share…Email: dimple@talkingcircles.co
Talking Circles facilitates knowledge sharing opportunities between employees, empowering them to solve individual problems more quickly and more effectively. We match co-workers so they can share unique expertise and skills on-demand. People learn best from people and that’s why we built Talking Circles; so that you can share organisational knowledge at scale.
Request a demo: https://talkingcircles.co
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