Everyone understands the importance of collaboration in maintaining a strong company culture that aligns with your organisation’s goals. But surprisingly few understand how to cohesively implement enterprise collaboration tools that combat common communication challenges.
In this article we look at the three impediments to collaboration, how to overcome them, and the role of technology in helping to promote a collaborative culture.
Collaboration has been described as “the essence of team work and probably the most important reason businesses build teams in the first place.” Despite this, many companies still struggle to improve workplace collaboration. There are several reasons that enterprises might find a disconnect with employees. Company culture may not support employee collaboration, or the technology within the enterprise may not be sufficient to engage employees.
Technology researchers at Gartner back this up. According to Jeffrey Mann, vice president of research for the firm,
“Because we have access to very good tools in our private lives we expect the same level of functionality and performance in business.”
Whilst we’ve seen a lot of changes take place with regards to enterprise technology in recent years, often it’s the case that employees have to work with legacy systems that don’t offer the enterprise collaboration tools without the fuss. Often, legacy systems and processes just aren’t good enough to support shared workspaces and video conferencing, for example.
An effective collaboration platform should include:
- A suite of social tools – Instant messaging, wikis, blogs, profiles, shared workspaces
- Training capabilities – such as an eLearning platform and Learning Management Systems (LMS)
- Communication tools – to enable mobility, video conferencing
However, these modern tools are often underused in the enterprise. This is especially true when a set of tools are ‘bolted on’ to existing systems without any thought given to how employees conduct their day-to-day work.
Three Impediments to Collaboration Success
According to Forbes, there are three main challenges that enterprises face when making changes to culture and technology to enable employee collaboration.
- Unclear goals
- Lack of a transparent decision-making process
- Management not sticking to the process
And the larger the enterprise, the more pronounced these challenges are likely to be. In order to enable collaboration it’s necessary to invest time in sound planning and to involve employees in the process from inception. This increases transparency, raises awareness of new collaboration platforms and systems, and ensures that executives have to stick to the plan.
ZD Net states that,
“The social enterprise is about culture, management and process. It’s not about software.”
Whilst of course software will play a part in enabling collaboration, without effective management and a culture that supports it, it’s unlikely to be successful. ZD Net goes on to say,
“Social without business process integration won’t work.”
This is because adding social tools onto the network alone isn’t enough to ensure that employees will use them. Add to this that without a clear business goal for adding enterprise collaboration tools, there’s no good reason for a social project to go ahead. So whilst employees want and will use social tools in their working life, there has to be a reason for them to do so and this has to be made clear to them through the process of adding these tools to the network.
Growing Industry
Social intranets are a rapidly growing industry sector. Many businesses now use social technology internally.
According to a Deloitte Trends Report, 70% of respondents believe workers will spend more time on collaboration platforms in the future, 67% see growth in“work-based social media,” and 62% prediction increase in instant messaging. On the other hand face-to-face meetings and phone meetings are expected to continually decline.
Transparency is Key to Success
What can be done to overcome this? As discussed, sound planning and transparency are key in ensuring that a company culture can be fostered that encourages employees to participate in collaboration. Technology and the tools chosen also play a key role, as does leadership. It will be necessary to ensure that when people focus on the fact that they have a job to do, they are aware of how the technological tools can enable them to do this through collaboration.
Social tools on the intranet are often discounted due to a lack of knowledge in the employee, who either doesn’t know that they’re there, or doesn’t know how to use them. Sometimes, for example, conflicts occur within teams due to a lack of effective document management. To truly realise the benefits of collaboration, teams need a clear purpose and a leader who is willing to articulate it.
Build Strong Teams
With this in mind, for effective collaboration to take place, it’s necessary to create strong teams, who can work towards a common goal. They should be aware of the business processes and goals that are a part of the overall equation, and they should be given the right tools to communicate and collaborate with other employees (regardless of department or geographical location), customers, suppliers and other partners.
Evan Rosen, author of The Culture of Collaboration states that enterprises that foster a collaborative business culture “increasingly develop reputations surrounding their ability to collaborate.”
“Those that are perceived to be collaborative often find it easier to recruit top talent and partner with other successful companies,” he says.
However, it’s no small feat to ensure that employees are on track and utilising the tools on offer.
“Too often,” Rosen goes on to say, “organizations cultivate a star culture and the media reinforces the system by celebrating individual achievement. Unfortunately, a culture based on rising to the top and receiving individual rewards and recognition frequently results in competitiveness, secrecy, and in many cases, less then optimal results.”
Thus, enterprises looking to enable a collaborative culture need to place emphasis on teams and team work - on collaborating with others - rather than on individual achievements. This encourages working harmony, as the team strives to ensure that it gets the job done satisfactorily.
Value and Reward Teams, Not Individuals
Almost all projects carried out within an enterprise will be a result of team work, so the trick is to ensure that all members of the team feel rewarded and valued. This can be incentivised through bonus schemes, but it’s also useful to allow employees to feel individual, personal job satisfaction. This could be done through training, which employees can undertake at their leisure, and through knowledge sharing within the enterprise.
Social tools such as profiles, wikis and blogs can help to enable this. Not only does it allow for a repository of useful knowledge to be built up by the enterprise itself, but it also gives the employee a sense that they have a voice within the business and that they are valued and trusted.
These also allow for relationships to be built and fostered between employees and executives. In turn, this allows for more effective collaboration between those people, as they can easily be found on the intranet through personal work profiles and the knowledge that they have added. This also means that it’s easier to approach an employee armed with the knowledge of what they can do, which department they work in and so on.
Build an External Culture of Collaboration
It’s not enough however to build teams alone, even those that understand the importance of collaboration. It’s also necessary to build a culture that understands that external collaboration with customers, suppliers and partners is vital to the overall mix.
An enterprise that enables collaboration both internally and externally can be judged as one that has carried this out successfully. In order for a culture to emerge and become entrenched within normal working practices, it should become second nature to collaborate with every business-related contact.
In order to do this, enterprises must:
- Define and build upon a shared purpose
- Cultivate a culture of contribution
- Develop processes that enable employees to work together in flexible yet disciplined ways
- Create an infrastructure where collaboration is valued and rewarded
This means that it’s necessary to be clear about where the business is going for every department. This allows employees to have a clearer focus and understand what needs to be done and how collaboration can help. Many enterprises inadvertently discourage collaboration as they fail to create consistent formal processes for collaboration.
To overcome this, enterprises should,
- Train employees in how and when to collaborate
- Make collaboration an integral part of an employee’s role
- Recognise those employees who effectively collaborate and reward them
Tools and Technology to Enable Collaboration
For an employee to be able to collaborate effectively, they must be given the correct online collaboration tools to do so. Company intranet solutions have changed beyond all recognition in the last decade and now, rather than being a repository for knowledge, it’s a resource that can help to build relationships and share knowledge. The company intranet should include enterprise social networking tools to help foster a sharing culture, and to enable a simple means of communicating.
As previously mentioned, it should include:
Ideally, any intranet project should be supported by the CEO and other top-level executive to ensure that employees recognise the relevance and importance to the enterprise. This, alongside excellent planning and transparency, will make for a better chance that workers will engage with the intranet and use it as intended. Executives should be among the first to offer a strong presence on the intranet too, so that employees can be led by example. This can be further strengthened by ensuring that documentation regarding company policies – with regards to governance, for example – are placed on the intranet where they can be accessed by everyone.
Build Trust on the Intranet
It’s also necessary to build trust through the intranet so that employees feel confident in sharing and properly managing knowledge.
According to intranetizen, this can be done by:
- Attributing content – providing a link to the original author of content ensures that it’s trusted by others that access it and the author gets some sense of personal satisfaction. As well as the author’s name, their department and a link to their profile should be added so that those accessing the content can easily ask questions, or even collaborate to improve the content.
- Add dates – this allows employees to track the life of the content and see when it’s been updated, or whether it needs to be.
- Ensuring leaders are visible – team leaders should maintain a constant presence on the intranet, especially in the early days of adoption. This should take the form of discussion, rather than just adding blogs or wikis, in order to demonstrate to teams that the intranet is seen to be central to everything work-related.
Bringing it all Together
The importance of collaboration, specifically online collaboration cannot be denied. It’s thought that those enterprises which enable it successfully tend to perform better across the board and tend to be more innovative. For enterprises that have not yet enabled it, collaboration can be difficult to implement as it depends on a few factors.
These include company culture, transparency, alignment with business processes and goals and building trust. Added to these must be the correct tools to enable people to carry out their jobs more effectively and to communicate and collaborate easily. This requires sound planning, which should involve executives and leaders from the start. Employees should be made aware of the project and feedback gathered from them from the beginning.
For example, an initial step in creating an intranet plan should be to gather feedback on what employees like and dislike about the existing intranet. This should also ask what tools employees would like to see implemented on the intranet. This allows employees to get involved and will result in a higher level of engagement when it comes to deployment.
A good social intranet should prompt employees to work productively by collaborating with colleagues through the tools that it offers. Employees should be encouraged to create content and to partake in discussions for best results. Essentially, good collaboration though is achieved through making it central to many of the enterprise’s communication practices. Once it becomes second nature to employees, it can be considered a collaborative enterprise and with that, comes success in terms of finances, employee satisfaction, customer service and knowledge sharing.
