7 Tips for Integrating Collaboration in Your Organisation

While customer collaboration and employee collaboration do solve very different and unique problems, employee collaboration has tremendous value to your customers.

Employees are able to provide a better experience and superior support by being able to tap into internal experts, information, and resources which can be used to help customers.

Consider a customer that is working with a support representative who unfortunately does not know how to solve the customer’s problem.  The employee however has access to the entire organization to find the right information and share it with the customer.

Perhaps the most important principle of collaboration is that it can make the world a better place.  Sure, collaboration can make our employee more productive and benefit our customers, but collaboration also allows employees to feel more connected to their jobs and co-workers, reduces stress at the workplace, makes their jobs easier, allows for more work freedom, and in general makes them happier people.

This means less stress at home, less arguments with spouses, and more time to spend with loved ones.  Collaboration not only positively impacts the lives of employees at work but also at home.

Here are some top tips for establishing collaboration within your organisation.

1.  Strategy before technology

Before rushing to pick that shiny new collaboration platform focus on developing a strategy which will help you understand the “why” before the “how.”  This is crucial for the success of any collaboration initiative.  You don’t want to be in a position where you have deployed a technology without understanding why.

2.  Integrate into the flow of work

Collaboration should never be seen as an additional task or requirement for employees.  Instead collaboration should fit naturally into their flow of work.  For example instead of having employees use multiple usernames, passwords, and log-in sites; create a “front-door” to the enterprise accessed through your collaboration platform.

3.  Listen to and value your employees

Don’t focus on the overall corporate value and benefit when communicating collaboration to employees.  Employees care about how this will impact them on an individual basis.  How will this make their jobs and lives easier?

We are always so adamant about listening to the voice of the customer, yet we should also consider the voice of the employee. When going down the collaboration road within your enterprise it’s important to make employees a part of the decision making process from step one.  Listen to their ideas, their needs, and their suggestions and integrate their feedback in your technology and strategy.

4.  Create a supportive environment

If your organization focuses on rewarding employees for individual performance as the main driver of success then it will become quite hard to encourage employees to share and communicate with each other.  Why would they want to?

There is nothing wrong with rewarding employees for great performance but it’s also crucial to reward teamwork.  For example, organizations can make a percentage of an employee’s bonus tied to how well they collaborate with their co-workers.  A supportive environment also means having training and education resources available for employees as well as evangelists within the organization.

5.  Lead by example

If leaders at your organization don’t use and support collaborative tools and strategies then why should the employees?  Leaders are very powerful instruments to facilitate change and encourage desired behaviours. They must be visibly on board.

6.  Measure what matters

There are a lot of things that an organization can measure but that doesn’t mean that all of these things should be measured.  Focus on the metrics that matter to your organization and the ones that are tied back to a business case.  Some organizations focus on “busy” metrics such as comments submitted or groups created.  Others focus on metrics such as engagement (defined as how connected and passionate an employee feels about the company and the work they do).

7. Adapt and evolve

It’s important to remember that collaboration is perpetual.  It’s a never ending evolution as new tools and strategies for the workplace continue to emerge.  This means that it’s important for your organization to be able to adapt and evolve as things change.  Keep a pulse on what’s going on in the industry and inside of your organization.  This will allow you to innovate and anticipate.