In a professional landscape where people are spending about 50% more time engaged in collaborative work than they used to, it’s no wonder that effective collaboration is in the top four most important skills for their future success.
But how do professionals build the skills to be great collaborators? And how can businesses achieve effective collaboration?
6 Ways to Achieve Effective Collaboration at Work in 2021
Effective collaboration in the workplace is all about facilitating a work environment that prioritizes trust, communication, and accountability.
1. Build Trust Between Colleagues
Whether you’re a solo professional working with a team of contractors or a team leader overseeing a group of employees, the first step in achieving effective collaboration is to build trust. The more people trust each other, the more they like working together and, in turn, the more effectively they’ll collaborate.
For this to be the case, people need to feel safe to give and receive genuinely constructive feedback, be inspired by a common goal, and have the tools and opportunities to connect.
So, how do you build trust?
With the rest of the remaining steps.
2. Encourage Open-Mindedness
Effective collaboration depends on your ability to keep an open mind to new ideas and new ways of doing things. Oftentimes, people collaborating on a project come from different backgrounds and fields of expertise which means they’re going to have different perspectives on the same goal or challenge.
One way to encourage open-mindedness is to start meetings with a reminder of what you’re looking to achieve and that ideas should be discussed with curiosity, not criticized.
3. Set Clear and Measurable Goals and Parameters for Success
In order to achieve effective collaboration in any professional setting, there need to be clear and measurable goals in place as well as tangible parameters for success.
If you’re going to collaborate effectively, everyone needs to understand the group’s common goals, how they’re measured, who’s responsible for which components, and when certain deliverables are due.
4. Prioritize Communication
Communication is a key element of effective collaboration at work. And that’s why it’s important to implement tools that make communication as easy and efficient as possible–especially in our increasingly virtual world.
And since everyone communicates differently and has different levels of comfort with how and when they communicate, this can include encouraging communication in group settings but also ensuring that you provide opportunities for one-on-one communication as well. After all, some people will thrive off, say, the back-and-forth banter of hashing things out in a group setting, and others may have great ideas to contribute but lack the confidence to speak up in a group.
Make sure you have communication tools in place, such as Zoom, Skype, or another alternative for video conferencing and Slack for direct messaging and chit-chat.
5. Support Healthy Debate
Strong communication empowers another critical component of effective collaboration: healthy debate.
One of the benefits of working in a team of skilled people with diverse backgrounds is that they all bring a different type of value to the table. And sometimes, finding the best solution or course of action requires a healthy debate.
The keyword here is healthy: that means it’s constructive, not combative. Questions and challenges come from a place of curiosity and exploration, not putting people down or asserting dominance.
Mastering the art of engaging in a healthy debate will do wonders for your ability to collaborate effectively.
6. Promote Accountability
Effective collaboration only works if there’s a culture of accountability in place. Creating this comes back to the clear and measurable goals you’ve laid out and, more importantly, the team’s ability to understand how their individual contributions fit into the bigger picture and affect the group.
An easy way to do that?
You can use project management tools like Trello or Backlog to provide everyone with visibility into each aspect of a project and to keep track of where each component stands in real-time.
If you want to learn more about tools to help you stay organized, check out our blog post: 9 Essential Tools to Help Entrepreneurs Stay Organized.
7. Get People Together in Person
Sometimes, the easiest way to encourage effective collaboration is through good old-fashioned in-person facetime.
While this isn’t always easy or feasible given the COVID-19 pandemic or distributed team members, a lot can be said for being able to get a team (or as much of a team as possible) together to connect in real life.
At The Post Workspaces, we offer professional meeting rooms that feature everything you need for a collaborative meeting–including a coffee and snack bar, Zoom rooms, top-tier technology and AV equipment, and a safe, sanitized environment for your group to gather that includes our high-end hospitality and personal services.
Additional services can be added on as well, such as customized food and beverage service and COVID-compliant food catering services from our favorite local restaurant! We do limit the number of guests in each of our meeting rooms to comply with our social distancing guideline, but we welcome groups of up to six people
Effective collaboration is key to success in business, whether you’re a solo pro working with a group of contractors, a satellite team, or a leader managing a group of employees. And by taking these few simple steps, you can achieve it.
The Post offers professional meeting rooms for solo professionals, small teams, and established organizations.
To learn more about our meeting spaces, or if you’d like to book a tour of our space, get in touch with us today!