Many of the world’s most innovative companies, including Netflix and Google, excel in promoting employee productivity because of one very important thing: they know how to support strong team collaboration.
In today’s fast-paced business world, companies simply can’t afford to waste time trying to align employees across siloed departments. Everything from an inability to find information, to problems connecting with the right people at the right time, damages your organisation’s productivity and makes it harder for you to serve your customers. It’s no wonder that 75% of businesses believe that online collaboration tools are an essential part of running a successful business.
“Team work makes the dream work”
Team collaboration gives today’s businesses the cohesion, clarity, and agility they need to thrive in an ever-changing digital world. Here are the most significant benefits of investing in company teamwork.
1. Greater Innovations and Insights
Perhaps the most obvious benefits of collaboration is the connections that it allows your company to achieve. The more perspectives and opinions you have in a single environment, the more likely you are to come up with creative solutions to common enterprise problems. Team collaboration and digital collaboration tools bring people from all around your business together in the same environment. This means that you can get multiple insights at once, enhancing business development, and potentially giving you new opportunities to impress your customers.
Many team collaboration tools also come equipped with tracking tools and reporting features that allow business leaders to analyse employee performance and gradually improve productivity within the workforce. When you can see how people are working together daily, you can do more to empower them into achieving better business outcomes. Strategies for team collaboration can even show business leaders where they need to invest in better training strategies for their employees.
2. Greater Business Flexibility
When people consider flexibility in relation to team collaboration, they often think about collaboration tools. Cloud-based collaborative software allows for instant messaging, conferencing, and file sharing wherever your employees are located. With a team collaboration strategy, businesses have more opportunities to implement things like remote working strategies because everyone can stay connected on the same tools.
Remote and flexible working policies generally lead to more satisfied and productive workers. What’s more, now that around 50% of the workforce is likely to be working remotely in the UK by 2020, flexible working isn’t something any company can afford to ignore.
However, team collaboration also promotes flexibility within the workforce at a more fundamental level. For instance, through collaborative tools, with a collaboration tool, a customer service agent can easily adjust their strategy when speaking to a client and request the help of an employee from a different department. Teamwork and collaboration are the foundational concepts of agile and flexible working strategies like Scrum.
3. More Engaged Employees
An often-quoted statistic in the business world today states that only 33% of employees are engaged. Disengaged staff members are never a good thing – regardless of what kind of business you run. When your employees aren’t involved at work, they’re less likely to stick around when another job opportunity comes up. This means that you’re left dealing with the consistent problem of staff turnover.
At the same time, a lack of engagement often leads to poor customers service. In a world where customer experience is key, companies can’t afford to have disengaged and disinterested employees leading the sales conversation. One of the best ways to get people to engage in the professional world is to improve teamwork and generate a stronger company culture. Widespread collaboration leads to more engaged workers who are more likely to embrace new projects and accept change as it happens.
In today’s agile workforce, team collaboration can lead to happier, more involved employees who are more willing to adopt the latest tools and resources.
4. More Productive Communication
Many businesses are beginning to look at team collaboration as the next stage of effective communication. Many unified communication platforms now come with collaborative solutions built-in. After all, when people can communicate effectively, collaboration instantly becomes easier. However, collaboration can also have an impact on the quality of communication within your organisation too.
For instance, proactive teamwork that enriches your corporate culture and ensures that everyone stays on the same page with their day-to-day work means that you’re less likely to need constant meetings. Fewer meetings mean less wasted time in the office and fewer reasons to drag people out of projects to sit them down and see how far they’ve come. Supervisors can simply track the performance of their employees through their team collaboration apps and set up meetings only when they’re necessary.
When meetings do take place in an environment equipped with proper team collaboration solutions, there’s also the option to work on issues together, using group conferences, video calling, and screen sharing.
5. Enhanced Individual Productivity and Business Profitability
According to one study by McKinsey and Company, simply adding collaborative processes to your business can improve productivity levels by up to 30% for global software teams. It makes sense that when your people can easily access the support they need from their team members, they’d be more efficient at work. Combine that with the fact that staff members don’t have to waste as much time searching for the data they need, and you’ve got everything you need for a more effective workforce.
Since collaboration improves the performance of your entire staff, it also helps to increase the outcomes in your bottom line. When you have the freedom to recruit superstars wherever they are in the world, build a culture of constant growth and innovation, and complete projects faster, you naturally make more money.
While the idea that team collaboration equals business success might seem a little simplistic, the studies speak for themselves. When Google for Work asked businesses which changes would impact profitability, 56% of responses said that collaboration was number one.
