Setting up a collaborative workspace is setting up your team speed, innovation and motivation to make your business move forward. It’s really easy to want a collaborative workplace, but it’s harder to make it work for a long term and require a lot of effort since the very beginning. But, when everything boils down collaboration isn’t anything more than conversations between people, and is your responsibility create strong environment foundations to boost your teammate’s skills. Everyone has something special, important or unique to offer to others.
Create a judgment-free zone
Setting times and places for your team discuss and share ideas could be an interesting approach to make sure that everyone talk with each other. You will be amazed to see people realize they could help each other out in ways they thought impossible before. But you need to go further, you need to push every employee to work outside job description. Can you imagine an engineer from your development team working with support or marketing teams? The inevitable will happen, a new feature will come up to improve your customer engagement or a slight change in your customer journey to make it smoother. This is the most clever way to improve productivity and spark creativity, bring people outside the usual work day and make them part of projects outside their job description, this will improve informal communication and open a channel to solve future problems.
To achieve a really collaborative workplace, breaking cubicles and embrace open spaces is not enough.
Making information accessible for all isn’t good enough
In a changing business environment driven by shifts in technology, work styles, and even demographics the discussion about how workspaces need to evolve is worthwhile. One of the key points to achieve the full potential of your team is how you handle the information. We need to go deeper into this discussion, we need to go beyond of the binary input of information if your team either have it or not. The truly collaborative workspace is much more sophisticated, isn’t just about how quickly your team can access shared information, but a real collaborative workspace is about how information is shared, discussed, debated to finally achieve the right goal.
Give them time to dream
If you want collaboration to work for the long run, give people the freedom to play it’s absolutely essential. It will empower every element of your team to explore, the ability to be creative and the output can be a new feature to increase revenue or a great improvement in processes which can lead to substantial cost savings. This kind of approach may work to solidify your company culture and for the team a space to take a breath from day-to-day work. The potential for positive results is worth the effort, at least improve morale, increase productivity and help you retain your team in today’s competitive labor market.
Help you retain your team in today’s competitive labor market.
To make this work you need to have your entire team with you, the workday will change which means you need to convince everyone to adopt new habits and change processes, so maybe is a good idea sit with them picking new tools and give time to implement new workflow. Don’t go too strong if you want this works.
Like Ken Blanchard used to say, “None of us is as smart as all of us”.
In meantime, you can always check how Winio.io can help your team improve collaboration.
