We say it all the time—collaboration is critical to your team’s success.
We talk about ways to collaborate, how to know if you’re not actually collaborating, and how to boost collaboration in the workplace. But what are the real benefits of collaborating with your team?
Why is collaboration important?
Collaboration improves the way your team works together and problem solves. This leads to more innovation, efficient processes, increased success, and improved communication.
Through listening to and learning from team members, you can help each other reach your goals. It takes hard work and a bit of time, but collaboration is worth it for the benefits your team will gain.
The benefits of collaboration
- Problem-solving
- Adaptability
- Open communication and participation
- Skill-sharing
- Goal alignment
- Engagement
Problem-solving
Have you ever faced a crisis at work where you didn’t know who to call on for help? This is preventable when you make collaboration a priority. A team that knows the processes and methods at hand is better equipped to streamline remedies and identify teammates who can help.
…to solve business problems and operate productively, organizations need the ability to leverage knowledge across the enterprise with online, seamless, integrated and intuitive collaboration tools that enhance your employees’ ability to work together.
—Deloitte, The Digital Workplace
What if the protocol for crisis management isn’t established? A collaborative team has the opportunity to brainstorm together, working off of each other’s expertise to find a solution. It’s all about working together—and knowing how to do it.
Adaptability
Like problem-solving, adaptability is a natural result of a collaborative team. If a team understands its function and its end goal, it can prepare for any situation that arises. Change is sure to happen within your field and forecasting that change is predictable for a prepared team. Teams and organizations have to change at a pretty rapid pace, and if your team isn’t aligned, it's easy for change to lead to disaster.
Open communication and participation
Teams that collaborate also communicate. Integrating collaborative tools like Asana and Todoist into your workflow, is the first step to communicating efficiently. Using these, teammates are able to see the work in progress, who’s responsible for it, and how it affects everyone’s work.
A team that knows how to collaborate is comfortable sharing their ideas and adding new processes and tools to the table. That level of participation means teammates can communicate with each other in a clear and direct manner. This brings forth new innovations and ways the team can improve. Always use a professional email address to communicate within the team and with the customer to have a good impression. This brings forth new innovations and ways the team can improve, like using a digital newsletter.
Skill-sharing
So your team is communicating, forecasting change, and problem-solving—but a team can't do this without the exchange of knowledge. If your team is able to bring its expertise to the table, everyone can coach each other, teach new skills, and elevate the team as a whole. And every good team has a diversity of knowledge that will contribute to new approaches to achieving success.
Goal alignment
A team reaches a common goal through a combination of individual and team-driven efforts. With a clear goal in mind, you understand your role and the purpose of your work. This means you can combine your abilities and knowledge to improve your workflow and achieve your common goal. Aligning on these goals leads to team-wide support, contributing to all-around skill-sharing and increased productivity.
Engagement
A supported employee is a satisfied employee—one who is comfortable sharing ideas and aligned with team goals, but also prepared to tackle what’s next. And a satisfied team member comes in each day ready to work and help the rest of the team. Engagement is important for many workplace benefits: productivity, profitability, retention, and happiness, to name a few.
As more workplaces prioritize employee engagement as a metric for success, it's essential to foster a collaborative environment for better engagement. If you want to be an engaged teammate, consider all the benefits of collaboration in the workplace to improve your own performance and support your team—that’s what it’s all about.
