6 Ways to Boost Collaboration Within Your Company

There’s no shortage of anecdotal evidence suggesting that companies don’t spend nearly enough time stimulating collaboration among employees. Walk into a modern office and you’ll find teams of people completely disengaged from what’s happening around them. Managers scratch their heads—wondering why on Earth their employees aren’t taking more time to know each other and work together.

The answer, however, should be glaringly obvious: Why should they? Simply assuming people will want to collaborate won’t necessarily make it happen. The culture and systems you build for your company will determine the effort your employees will put into working with one another. Here are six ways to boost collaboration within you company.

Offer Incentives

Looking for a way to boost collaboration in your office? Offering incentives is a great place to start. If people seem starkly unwilling to work together to better your company, you probably haven’t given them any incentive to do so. Why would workers (who get paid a set amount of money) want to change their routine, and take on more responsibility, with no clear payoff waiting for them?

Employees need to look out for their own interests just as much as their bosses. This doesn’t mean they need a carrot dangling in front of them before they’ll put in any effort. If that’s the case, you’ll probably want to look for some new hires. It does mean that you need to give people a reason to try though—at least if you’re interested in retaining talent. Explain how good collaboration leads to better sales, great productivity and increased employee satisfaction.

Increase Transparency

One of the quickest ways to get your employees to work with each other more is by allowing more transparency. People aren’t going to feel comfortable collaborating if they don’t totally trust their employer. They might fear that they are being secretly evaluated whenever forced to work in groups. A lack of transparency can be toxic for many reasons. But executives often don’t realize how it can lessen collaboration, until it’s already taken place.

Give Employees Better Tools

Many times, the factor keeping employees from working together isn’t cultural, but technological. If you want to get people to work together, give them the tools that will foster greater insights. Data visualization tools that can be embedded into different tools or workflows are a great place to start on this front. With stronger sharing capabilities, employees won’t struggle to share knowledge with peers and the company. Video conferencing tools and corporate chat channels can have a similarly beneficial effect as employees share ideas through these platforms.

Get Everyone on Board

On a more cultural note, it’s key to get your whole staff into the same mindset. It doesn’t matter if this is philosophical or goal-oriented. When everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goal, they are more likely to join to tackle challenges.

Of course, you can’t guarantee 100 percent compliance on this front. However, it’s essential that you take the time to formulate and implement company-wide missions. These can’t be cheap gimmicks or busy work. Employees will see right through that. Work with HR to develop a strategy that promote real collaboration and tackles real issues. Do this, and collaboration will flourish within your business.

Make Sure Everyone Has Proper Skills

There’s one thing that will always slow down, if not completely disrupt collaboration: lack of skills. You can’t run a successful team when several of the players don’t understand their roles. It’s essential that all employees get proper training when they’re hired. And that training shouldn’t stop after a certain amount of time.

Keep checking back with individuals to ensure that they understand their duties and places within the company. Just like a machine, a company needs all its parts properly functioning to be successful.

Don’t Force It

If you’re going to try to force collaboration onto you employees, you might as well not even try at all. This is something that needs to happen organically, in response to stimuli and situations fostered by management teams. Just sticking a bunch of people in a room and telling them to figure out how to collaborate won’t work. It will breed additional resentment. And that’s no good.

There’s no exact formula for boosting collaboration within a company. There are things to do, and things to not do, but it’s up to you to figure out the best combination of these variables for your own business.