Businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to encourage team collaboration. When successful team skills are absent, your business can end up as a collection of competing silos and individuals.

Collaboration Challenges

• Poor Engagement – Developing a collaborative group starts with the team itself. This includes buy-in concerning process, direction and expected outcomes. If teams aren’t engaged, they won’t be able to identify problems or find solutions.
• Competition – Turf wars discourage collaboration. In fact, one of collaboration’s main benefits is that people, even those with vastly different skill sets, can mentor and teach each other.
• Lack of Transparency – When you have team members whose work depends on others, they need to share their progress, concerns, and obstacles. Without transparency, teams can’t establish trust.
• No Team Governance – People tend to resent collaboration when they aren’t given clear objectives and key performance indicators or don’t understand what their teammates bring to the table.

The Solutions

• Start with the mission – To create collaboration, team members need to have a convincing reason to buy into the mission. When they’re given a clear cause to engage in, team members naturally become as passionate about team goals as their leaders. When collaboration permeates the entire organization, everyone wins – engaged employees mean increased retention, faster time to market, and improved profitability.
• Promote positive change – To strengthen a company, create a values-based culture. When you treat employees as people instead of cogs in a wheel, and ensure their managers focus on positive interactions, you remove the stress that can lead to a toxic workplace. When employees are happy and collaboration improves, so does an organization’s ability to handle sudden disruptions.
• Foster a culture of innovation – For teams to grow, they need to feel they have the ability to be creative, brainstorm, and question the status quo. It’s also important to ask team members for their ideas and reasoning on a regular basis. The more connected and understood they feel, the more motivated they’ll be to perform, think outside the box, and exceed expectations.
• Leverage technology – Use technology to strengthen internal and external communication via channels such as messaging and video conference calls. Collaboration tools help keep departments and decision-makers on the same page at all times. This is even more crucial as companies become increasingly distributed.

Team collaboration is the main ingredient your organization needs in order for every other element – talent, innovation, productivity, and profitability – to fall into place.

Let’s talk about overcoming your challenges by leveraging technologies that enable collaboration. Contact TCI today: (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.