This guide outlines how to foster workplace collaboration and the sense of community in your teams. It would be fair to say that workplace collaboration and community are words that are thrown around frequently. Whether or not businesses understand their true meaning and power is another point entirely. Promoting community and workplace collaborationhas endless benefits for both the employer and employee, so let’s understand how this can be achieved in the modern workplace.
Promoting workplace collaboration and community
Whether you already have a fantastic work culture or quite a bad one, there are actionable ideas to take away and implement for every circumstance. Now let’s get started!
Create spaces for workplace collaboration and community
The lack of community and workplace collaboration in your office might be easily rectified with an office redesign. Cast a critical eye over your office flow and try to identify where employees can get together and socialise and work together – because these spots are going to be where the community vibes thrive. Consider a station with office coffee beans and a great coffee machine to promote an atmosphere of relaxation and casual conversation. If you haven’t prioritised these spaces or they are too exposed to the entire office and management, building collaboration will be a slower process. As a guide, try and emulate a cafe or personal space environment.
Open brainstorm sessions
You might not be thrilled by the idea of another meeting in your calendar, but opening up the floor for free brainstorming and discussion can be a great way to foster workplace collaboration. Google is famous for having these sorts of sessions, and in fact, Google Ads was started by the company encouraging employees to get creative and work together on their ideas. Amazon’s brainstorming process is also unconventional, where they write a press release and FAQ for something they haven’t yet done to work backwards and achieve that goal. A thriving community will follow when you build this environment where ideas can flourish and collaboration is the DNA to your success.
Reward the right behaviour
As humans, we repeat behaviour that elicits a positive response. As an employer, you can start to reward and celebrate when your employees work together on projects or solve issues as a team. This signals to the team that workplace collaboration is not only encouraged but is what is expected of them. Collaboration also provides benefits for the employees as they will start to work smarter and not harder, and they can be across more parts of the business and receive support in their own area. You can also communicate that collaboration is a key competency that employers look for, so they are setting themselves up for future success when they advance in their careers.
Make it organic
Forcing your team members to work and socialise together will only get you so far with workplace collaboration, and the personal and professional bonds will only be surface deep. Instead, communicate with your team to understand how they would like to work with one another in workplace collaboration. You might find that they simply require a hot desk approach so that they can sit with new colleagues each day. They may even indicate that clocking off early on Friday for work drinks would allow them to get to know one another. Chances are, their ideas will surprise you! Make this bonding and collaborating process organic, and let them guide you when you get stuck, as they are the ones who are going to be building this culture.
Provide interesting tasks
When the team has an unpleasant, monotonous work routine and still receives non-challenging jobs that do not explore their skills and competences, members can become discouraged. With that in mind, when delegating a task, try to make it more interesting and challenging. The greater the capacity of the employee, the greater the challenge must be. And the bigger the challenge, the bigger the reward.
An interesting tip is to create specific teams to participate in strategic projects within the organization for workplace collaboration. The manager can create working groups aimed at conducting market research or collecting information for the development of new products and services. Once the project is completed, employees can be encouraged to present the results to the entire team, which will jointly assess the feasibility of putting the idea into practice.
A productive team must always seek to generate significant advances and leave the obvious. Therefore, before entrusting a function to someone, the manager needs to analyze the need to provide training for the team. Encouraging innovation and the search for knowledge is a way to demonstrate that the employee is important to the company and that the management is interested in the contribution of this professional to the growth of the business.
Build trust among members
In addition to showing that he believes in the team, the manager needs to generate trust among employees for workplace collaboration. The more people are confident in their work, the more they become creative, innovative and open to new ideas. To create a comfortable and safe environment, it’s critical to truly act on what you expect of your coworkers. That way, they will understand that everyone is aligned and working together to achieve the goals. People who don’t feel confident tend to hold back their doubts, opinions, ideas and observations. Over time, this can lead to demotivation and a great loss of intellectual property.
Encourage team spirit
Individuals who identify with the work group tend to have a collective vision and begin to understand that their success is also linked to the team’s success in workplace collaboration. With that, everyone’s idea becomes important and starts to be respected.
This sense of belonging generates empathy, improves interpersonal relationships, increases the sense of responsibility and provides a collaborative attitude. Professionals need to understand that actions taken in groups can generate more satisfactory results than individual attitudes. In this way, the company that encourages team spirit in its collaborators gains greater links of loyalty and collaboration, producing greater collective engagement.
Create incentive programs
It is essential to know how to recognize and reward the team whenever a workplace collaboration job is done well. Try to encourage your company’s professionals through an incentive program. You can provide, for example, benefits such as commissions for achieved goals. But the gratification doesn’t necessarily have to be financial. It is possible to offer other advantages, such as courses, days off, movie or theater tickets, gift certificates or tours. Choose the award according to group preferences and company conditions.
The performance of employees is directly linked to the company’s potential. To promote changes in the work environment, it is necessary to go far beyond charging, motivating and inspiring employees. Defining strategies, goals and incentive programs helps to improve team performance and ensure good results for the organization.
Invest and encourage communication
Many managers are not aware of the impact that communication generates within the company for workplace collaboration. This is undoubtedly one of the most important issues in planning and improving team performance. Therefore, the company must invest in good communication channels, encouraging sectors to maintain an efficient dialogue and creating mechanisms to avoid noise or inconsistencies in information among employees.
In addition to causing positive effects in the routine of working with customers and suppliers, when well-developed communication helps to avoid misunderstandings and conflicts between team members in workplace collaboration.
Encourage professional and personal development
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, your human capital is one of the main pillars supporting your business. Using an analogy of a physical support structure, it is essential that this structure is under constant maintenance that allows it to maintain its strength.
In a work group that involves people, this maintenance can be described as the technical and human development and training of professionals. The company is largely responsible for encouraging the professional and personal training of its employees. Therefore, invest in courses and lectures and encourage your team to dedicate time to their training and professional qualification.
Conclusion
The beauty of working with people and building a community is that it is ever-changing, so remember to be agile and don’t resist the natural ebbs and flows of the process. Bonds are not born overnight, and workplace collaboration begets more workplace collaboration, so start today, and you will be closer to a more productive workplace tomorrow!
