The Importance Of A Collaborative Work Environment To Increase Productivity

There’s an old adage that says that too many cooks will spoil the broth. When it comes to the modern workplace, however, that’s not necessarily true. In fact, in today’s highly competitive and crowded marketplace, the most successful companies are often the most collaborative.

After all, the more eyes you can get on a project, the more minds you can direct toward a shared mission, the more hands you can get to help with the heavy lifting, the more productive, efficient, and innovative your workforce will be. Nevertheless, though it is essential, it is not always easy to foster collaboration in the workplace. Let’s examine the importance of cultivating a collaborative work environment to increase productivity and describe best practices for making it happen.

Why Collaboration Matters

If you’ve ever been a part of a team, then you’re probably familiar with the unique synergy that occurs when a group of people come together, united in a single mission and focused on a shared goal. Such synergy means that teams who are collaborating well are often far greater, far more effective, than the sum of their parts. When you have a strong team dynamic, you have a force multiplier, the unique talents of each individual member amplified through their engagement and interaction with their peers.

When such team unity emerges in the workplace, the result is often a significant increase both in productivity and innovation. In fact, a report from PGI noted that highly collaborative work environments were 15% more innovative on average than organizations based principally on competition and autonomous work. The report also noted that 80% of millennial employees strongly preferred collaboration over solo projects.

Effective collaboration creates a work environment in which workloads are more manageable and equitably distributed, where responsibility and accountability are shared, and creative problem-solving and strategic planning can flourish.

Effective teams, in other words, crackle with energy and creativity, making them highly engaging for your employees. In general, an engaged employee is a happy employee, and a happy employee is significantly more productive than an apathetic or unhappy one.

Cultivating A Positive Organizational Culture

Despite the demonstrable advantages of successful collaboration, it’s not always easy to transform a group of disparate individuals into a cohesive, high-performing team. The key is to foster a positive organizational culture, one in which each feels safe, valued, and heard.

For example, if employees do not feel secure in expressing their ideas, communicating their concerns, asking questions, or venting their frustrations, then you’re not going to have a truly collaborative environment. What you will have is a collection of separate individuals trying to follow orders, meet requirements, and protect their own best interests.

However, when you establish a judgment-free communication zone, where employees are free to share perspectives and experiences, both positive and negative, then everyone will inevitably open up and become more transparent and expressive. It is that kind of openness that fosters creative problem-solving, which in turn leads to innovation, and ultimately boosts productivity.

Establishing a judgment-free zone, though, often requires business leaders to modify their practices in some ways. For instance, though openness and transparency are crucial in a collaborative environment, that does not mean that employees — especially managers — should simply blurt out the first thing that comes into their minds.

Respect and empathy for others should be a principal concern in a team environment, especially when it involves communication between supervisors and subordinates. Fostering an environment where employees feel safe to explore ideas, take risks, and share their perspectives requires leaders to ensure that employees always feel validated, even if their ideas or efforts sometimes miss the mark. One important rule of thumb for striking this delicate balance is for leaders to adopt a habit of praising employees in public but critiquing them only in private.

Give Teams Proper Collaboration Tools

As innovative and productive as good teams can be, working with groups, especially if some or all team members work remotely, can get complicated. It can be easy for team members to lose track of who is responsible for what.

This can lead to errors, misunderstanding, and miscommunication. It can also significantly slow down work progress and lead to a lot of avoidable frustration. When you provide your employees with accessible, user-friendly collaboration tools, such as a secure internal direct messaging platform and a project tracker and calendar, you’re going to make collaboration even for diverse, distributed teams far easier.

Likewise, a well-crafted, easy-to-read organizational chart can help employees keep track of the communication flow and chain of responsibility. With this tool, they will always know who is responsible for what and how to access any information they may need to fulfill their particular project duties.

The Takeaway

Once upon a time, workplaces were populated by isolated workers, toiling alone in their little cubicles or tiny, secluded offices. Today, however, business leaders and HR managers alike have recognized that the key to productivity and innovation lies in collaboration. That means that if you want your company to survive and thrive in the modern marketplace, your first order of business should be to foster the kind of collaborative work environment that engages and inspires employees and produces powerful results for your organization.