Team Collaboration: What is it and How to Foster it?

Achieving the level of team collaboration that most managers desire may seem challenging. Nevertheless, it’s a goal worth striving for. With workers sharing strong team values and a will to succeed, businesses can achieve unprecedented success. 

Every team consists of members with different backgrounds, personalities, and working styles. While this may have synergic benefits, sometimes it can be hard to combine contrasting energies. 

Unproductive conflicts between team players may hinder goal achievement and company success. That is why it is important to map out strategies to foster team collaboration. 

What is Team Collaboration?

Team collaboration means working together as one cohesive unit to achieve outcomes superior to those achieved individually. It encompasses activities such as brainstorming, fostering creativity, and leveraging diverse skills to strive toward a shared objective. 

The team may work together or cross-collaborate across different departments or external partners. 

With the global business landscape opening to hybrid, remote, and freelance workforces, team collaboration has become more vital than ever. Managing teams is already challenging enough; so encouraging teamwork in remote environments is even harder. 

Why is Team Collaboration Important?

To understand why team collaboration is essential for success, you must discover the consequences of having team dysfunction. 

The best way to visualize a team disarray is to think of a cart dragged by a horse, a lion, a fish, and a sheep. They’re all different animals with their strengths and weaknesses. But more importantly, they’re not meant to work together at all. 

Team collaboration depends not only on the composition of people but also on how well they work together. When teams are collaborative, individuals come together to generate ideas, tackle challenges, and accomplish tasks. 

Within such a setting, people can combine their capabilities, sparking inspiration through exchanging fresh ideas.

Even better, collaborative teams usually encourage members to be unapologetically themselves. Such comfort may set the stage for maximum team synergy. 

On that note, let’s check out some benefits of team collaboration.

Advantages of Team Collaboration

You’re already aware that team collaboration is non-negotiable for success. Still, let’s establish how it can skyrocket your success:

Higher Efficiency and Productivity

According to Deloitte, workers work 15% faster when they collaborate. This may be because team members regularly communicate, give prompt feedback, and can spot discrepancies sooner rather than later. 

The study also revealed that when workers work in collaborative teams, they are more engrossed in their tasks and feel invested in project success. Instead of focusing on personal fame, collaborative team members move as a joint force and strengthen each other. 

As a result, they may work diligently and don’t stop until they achieve their combined goals. 

Knowledge Sharing

Team collaboration fuels knowledge sharing. Since it brings together people from diverse skill sets, knowledge, and experience, it elevates:

• Exposure to new ideas, schools of thought, and creative thinking
• The ability to seek knowledge, request and give feedback, chances for improvement

In an environment conducive to learning, workers grow individually and combine expertise to achieve success.

Innovation

When team members share ideas and theories based on experience, they may feel safer experimenting and driving innovation. Working jointly gives the mental cushion for taking innovative leaps of faith in business. 

For example, innovative companies often partner with external parties and customers to create new concepts and products. 

Effective Problem Solving

Instead of being stumped at facing a problem, you can always count on your team members to show you a way out. 

You may arrange a brainstorming session with your team or ask a colleague to comment on the situation. Either way, you’ll have access to multiple possible solutions recommended by those with firsthand knowledge and experience. 

Employee Satisfaction

Those working in healthy teams often derive greater satisfaction from their jobs. One reason could be that working in teams may feel less isolating, with regular communication among members. 

When workers share good camaraderie, work may not feel as stressful. Collaboration often looks like sharing coffee breaks, cheerful banter, bouncing ideas, and pulling each other up. All these factors may garner life-long friendships.

Good relationships between team members can be a strong motivator for workers to stay with the organization, resulting in higher retention rates. 

Better Corporate Culture

Building a sound reputation for your organization is a tricky and long-term process. One bad incident can knock you off. However, fostering collaboration in teams is a time-tested way to create a great corporate culture. 

An organization known for satisfied employees, great collaboration between team members, and shared vision sounds like an ideal work environment. 

If you can flaunt a commendable corporate culture, you will most likely attract new talent, generate market interest, and even hire high-value talent. Such assets may greatly add to your company’s goodwill. 

How to Build Team Collaboration?

Let’s go over some of the tactics you can apply to encourage team collaboration:

Establish Goals

When goals are set, everyone is informed of expectations and common objectives. Setting goals also facilitates the management of both individual and collective tasks as tracking progress becomes more aligned. 

In organizations where goals are clear, employees are more likely to monitor their productivity and hold each other accountable. 

Goals serve as strong motivators by helping team members envision their future. If you make them time-bound and specific, it’s an added bonus. Having concrete goals is always more ideal than providing vague directions.

Want to learn the art of goal-setting? Check out our blog on how to set SMART goals.

Set Expectations

When you set expectations beforehand, you communicate the acceptable level of performance for each team member. This clarity gives employees a clearer understanding of what is required and how to achieve the desired standards. 

Communicating expectations within various teams is beneficial to ensure consistency in results. Collaborative efforts between department managers serve as a fine example of effective interdepartmental collaboration.

Assign Roles

When fostering collaboration, consider assigning significant roles among multiple employees to stir active engagement. When delegating roles, assess the distinctive value each team member brings and how they can facilitate collaboration. 

Assigning roles is an ideal way to establish reporting lines. Additionally, assigning roles enables the provision of mentors to junior employees. When employees have designated mentors to seek assistance from, they are more inclined to collaborate and seek clarification on matters.

Create Rules

We advise encouraging team members to create rules. This way, they’ll be more accountable to uphold them and feel more comfortable following them. By following clear rules, team members have clarity in focus. 

While organizational ground rules must be followed, teams can establish their guidelines for collaboration across departments. These team-specific rules might outline communication protocols or meeting frequency. 

Promote Communication

To enhance collaboration, foster open dialogue among team members. Cultivating an atmosphere of free discussion encourages teams to voice their perspectives. Subsequently, it promotes active listening among other employees. 

Through increased communication, relationships are strengthened, and colleagues may become comfortable giving and receiving constructive feedback. 

Use communication tools like Slack and Teams to reap the myriad of collaboration features to optimize teamwork. 

Stay Organized

As teams grow, staying organized may become challenging. Timelines, responsibilities, and essential information must be organized to aid team members. 

One way to keep everyone in the loop is to schedule regular meetings to share updates and project progress. This may be especially useful for hybrid and remote teams, who need access to current developments to perform correctly. 

Another great tip is to use collaboration portals, such as Trello. These portals have organization-wide or team channels. You can share schedules, documents, and task progress and give direct feedback on projects. 

Team Building Exercises

Integrating team-building activities in team schedules regularly is an excellent method to foster employee bonding. 

Team-building exercises are especially helpful in overcoming differences in cross-departmental teams, particularly when merging two distinct teams. 

These activities vary from brief sessions before a meeting to elaborate games that may occupy a portion of the workday. 

Socialize Outside

A fun way to build collaboration between employees from various departments is to plan activities outside office premises. For example, arrange team dinners every month, or if the budget allows, give season tickets to popular games so team members can hang out informally. 

Helping team members create informal friendships is a great way to ensure they find one another easy and reliable to work with. 

Summing Up: Two Heads Are Better than One

With work becoming increasingly complex and the rise of remote and decentralized teams, managers must find ways to foster collaboration within them. 

Now that you have some excellent tips to promote collaboration and teamwork, start applying them and observe the resulting changes. 

A novel approach to stimulating collaboration in teams is to showcase what employees stand to gain from it. Counsel them to realize that adopting collaborative behaviors can create a happy and safe space for their personal and professional growth. They may build strong friendships and improve their skill set along the journey. 

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