Employee Collaboration

Employee Collaboration is one of the most critical skills in the workplace. With new advancements in communication technology, you can now collaborate more effectively with your team members, even across the world. Here are three tips to help you improve your employee collaboration and teamwork.

Why is employee collaboration important?

Employee collaboration is all about bringing people together from different backgrounds, locations and skillsets and getting them to work towards a common goal. As such, this leads to more innovation and problem solving among employees. In addition, it helps companies stay competitive by improving productivity and reducing costs.

What are the 3 Essential Skills for Teamwork?

1. Communication is an essential skill in any team

Successful teams have excellent communication between members. When you’re building a team, you need to encourage frequent, open, and honest communication about the following:

• Project deadlines and any changes
• Client’s expectations
• Each team member’s responsibility
• Challenges faced in a project

This effective communication will help you build trust and reduce conflicts that may arise from miscommunication over time. Thus, creating a more positive team environment.

2. Trust is key among team members

Research shows that teams which can build trust among members are more innovative and productive. But trust is something difficult to achieve, and even the best team leaders struggle to create that unique bond. It usually takes time for people to start trusting strangers.

Here are a few tips to help you develop team trust among your employees:

• Create group activities where people get to know each other (e.g. team lunches, team building activities)
• Design common spaces where employees can mingle freely at the office
• Allow people to choose their team members and form their teams
• Give people a sense of accountability for their tasks

3. Empathy bonds teams and helps reduce conflicts

Empathy is another important skill that can improve team collaboration. Empathy begins with putting yourself in the position of another person and trying to see things from that person’s point of view. When you work in a team, a common cause of conflict is having too many different views. When working in teams, many different views cause common conflicts. In short, empathy is the invisible bond that brings a team together and works towards a common goal.

How to encourage empathy among employees:

• Train employees to see things from a different perspective than their own. For example, someone working in marketing will have different views than someone working in accounting. So they need to understand the other team member’s goals and perspectives of success.

• Encourage employees to practice active listening and ask questions to their team members frequently to ensure there’s no miscommunication.

Conclusion - The 3 Essential Skills for Teamwork

Effective employee collaboration is something that all companies strive to achieve. And nurturing the right skills can help you build an effective team. Hopefully, these three skills will help you achieve better team collaboration and teamwork.

Ready to collaborate online with your team?

Try Kodalia’s collaboration tools now!