Tip of the Week: 5 Tricks to Building a Collaborative Office

Collaboration can present a great many benefits for the modern business. With technological innovations making it simpler than ever to cooperate, today’s business owners and executives need to know how to leverage these technologies into greater organizational efficiency. For this week’s tip, we give you five points of emphasis every manager has to understand in order to make new collaborative technology work for your business.

Onboard Usings Work Tools
When you onboard a new employee, one of the best ways that they can learn how to do their job is to work with an experienced coworker who can show them the ropes. Or, you can always do this by just throwing a new hire into action, forcing them to think about how they are going to solve problems. Either way, when your business has the right collaboration solutions in place, you can onboard employees faster, and get them up to speed more proficiently.

Lead By Example
Employees expect that their direct supervisors adhere to the same protocol that they must follow. For example, if you recommend certain ways of cooperating with other employees, but you don’t necessarily follow your own recommendations, they might see little value in doing so themselves. Therefore, by showing them first-hand how this type of collaboration benefits your business, they’ll be more likely to fall in line.

Know When to Step Aside
One of the most important parts of being a leader is understanding when it’s best to leave the job to the people you depend on to accomplish it. No good comes from micromanaging projects, and forcing people to work with other people that don’t offer any value to a project stymies positive collaboration, wasting time and reducing employee morale.

Encourage Employees to Speak Up
Employees want their voices to be heard, so allow them to share their thoughts and opinions whenever possible. Create an outlet that they can use to share thoughts, where employees can suggest ways to improve the organization and its workflows. Taking the opportunity to work together to resolve common issues will bring any team closer together, creating more efficient and higher quality work.

Outline the Benefits Collaboration has For Your Workers
Your workforce is made up of people that likely want to know what collaboration efforts have to do with their role in the office. They want to know how they individually will benefit from these strategies and tools. Instead of explaining how the company benefits from collaboration, explain how the users themselves will benefit from it. Even if a person is highly specialized, understanding the work that others put into a project typically gives workers a greater appreciation for other workers’ skills, making the team stronger.

How do you optimize workplace collaboration? Let us know in the comments.