Your work as a team leader can easily be compared to that of a coach. It is all about handling your team members’, mentality, collaboration strengths, and weaknesses to extract the most from them. You must always try to take 110% of your colleagues’ capacity in a collaborative manner that allows team spirit and cooperation to flourish.

Is it an easy job? No way. The difficulties lie down to collaboration, hence the lack of true coaches. Finding a very talented employee is easier than an average talented team leader. So, if you want to lead your team successfully, you should think twice and be certain that what you want to improve is through your team’s performance and not through your actions.

In this article, you will get 8 tips for improving team collaboration at work so that you can succeed and reach your business productivity goals.

8 Tips to Improve Team Collaboration

Building a strong collaborative team takes a lot of effort but is worth it as it boosts the productivity, creativity, and morale of your team. Here are some tips that will help you improve team collaboration at your digital workplace:

1. Set Key Milestones and Goals

When people with different roles work together, establish a common goal between all parties. Having a clear understanding of what they are working toward can help team members use their time effectively. This ensures they understand the company’s goals and plans.

Once you establish a common goal, your team can direct the conversation and workflow toward idea creation or problem-solving. The common goal also guides you and your team throughout the collaboration process to keep everyone on track.

Also, each one should have a very clear short-term target. If targets are long-term or if they are not set precisely, you will end up having people working on the wrong tasks, overlapping tasks, or even not working at all. Short-term targets help you follow up with their work and evaluate it correctly.

2. Define Roles and Responsibilities

When your team members know their specific duties, they will work with more focus and be better aligned with the goal. Moreover, there will be no duplicate work done.

As a manager, define clear roles and responsibilities for your team members. Collaboration does not mean that everyone will do the same tasks or that all resources can be reused. Having straightforward roles will help avoid conflicts and/or unassigned tasks. However, you should redefine these roles from time to time.

What’s more, accepting your errors early in role assignment can reduce the cost of the error. It will also give you the ability to try each member in different roles. Productivity measurement tools will help in the right way.

3. Use Collaboration Software

We don’t live in the middle ages anymore. Many enterprise collaboration platforms can help you assign tasks, create projects, track the team’s progress, add milestones, share documents online, share tasks, handle events, etc.

For instance, ProofHub fosters a collaborative environment by providing a central platform for communication, file sharing, and task management. This streamlines workflows, improves efficiency, and empowers teams to achieve their goals together.

On the other hand, Comidor focuses on enterprise collaboration by offering a digital workspace that helps improve process optimization and automation to perform business tasks more efficiently.

You can find any feature in these tools you could ever imagine about team collaboration. So, there is no excuse even if you have to manage teams in different locations. Even if you are a small company, implementing effective strategies and using the right tools can streamline communication and collaboration across diverse geographical areas. You could even use live video or audio chat to have a daily meeting. They usually offer powerful business intelligence tools to export analytics and reports.

4. Encourage Open and Transparent Communication

Encourage open communication and mean it. Collaboration happens when everyone feels like they can bring their whole selves to work.

As a manager, motivate your team members to participate, innovate, and communicate. Make sure that everyone is allowed to speak their minds and share their ideas. This means that instead of holding back their thoughts or reigning in their feelings, they can be themselves and bring all of the great ideas that come with it.

But, open communication also means that, sometimes, they are going to disagree. Disagreements are not counter to team collaboration. Healthy disagreements and open conversations are critical to unlocking successful team collaboration.

5. Manage Resources Effectively

If you are responsible for selecting your team members, think carefully about who you choose. If you choose members with identical abilities you will end up in conflicts between their roles. Balance in capacities is always the key to harmony.

Try to make at least two people work on a certain type of task periodically. Small groups of 2-3 team members can exchange ideas on accomplishing a certain task more efficiently. The knowledge inside the team should be shared and distributed evenly, ensuring that no single individual becomes the sole expert on a particular task or process.

6. Create a Sense of Community

You cannot collaborate with a stranger. Even open-source projects maintained by programmers located far from each other try to have a closer relationship.

This does not mean that everyone must be best friends with anyone, but that everyone sees the others as equivalent members. Respect and understanding are of top priority in a community. Egoism on the other side can have disastrous effects.

7. Hold Regular Meetings

A short meeting per day is helpful to see where the team is heading, what problems they face, and even get a hint on the relations growing among them. It also creates a light feeling of competition which often has creative results.

Nevertheless, you should try to keep a balance in your number of meetings frequency and duration, because long meetings especially in the middle of the day will end up reducing your team’s productivity dramatically.

8. Reward and Recognize Good Work

Justice and objectiveness are what team members want to have from their managers. Rewards can help in this direction. Personal rewards may lead to positive competitive feelings by other team members and more often end in everyone’s efforts to achieve the same good performance.

A team leader should be able to praise and thank the members of the team who try harder. The reward does not have to be something expensive. The gesture is what counts. Additionally, investing in employee upskilling is crucial. Providing opportunities for professional development not only enhances individual capabilities but also strengthens the overall team performance. When employees feel valued and see tangible growth in their skills, it fosters a culture of continuous improvement and commitment.

Conclusion

Building a cohesive and effective team is crucial for achieving success. By implementing the above team collaboration tips, you can build a highly collaborative team.

Successful teamwork means open communication among team members, clearly defined roles, and a sense of community. Effective team collaboration boosts efficiency and lets you and your team achieve your productivity goals.

*This article was written by the Comidor team in collaboration with an external guest author.

Author Bio
Vartika Kashyap, CMO at ProofHub, is a renowned B2B SaaS marketer with 17+ years of experience. She’s a prolific writer with 200+ articles on productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Vartika is a three-time LinkedIn Top Voice recipient and a thought leader in people management. Her work is featured on various top-tier publication platforms such as Muck Rack, Medium, eLearning Industry, Business2Community, DZone, Social Media Today, G2., and TweakYourBiz.

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The defeat brought to light an institutional failure of Brazilian talent, tactics, and temperament. Brazil’s national team represented the cream of the crop as far as individual football players were concerned, but they simply did not work together as well as their opponents. The strategy Germany employed to defeat Brazilian players was simplistic and centered around an absence of ego: a German player would draw defenders to chase him towards the goal to prevent him from scoring, then pass the ball on to his unnoticed teammate, who faced no opposition on the field. This same tactic was effective again and again.

Brazil had fallen victim to enhanced collaboration.

Collaboration between employees, customers, and partners has become a fundamental requirement for every organization that wishes to thrive in today’s market, no matter the size or industry.

Effective collaboration tools deepen connectivity with customers and partners, increase awareness and productivity, and provide document and file access to all team members. In an effort to share information more efficiently and more effectively, many departments have taken matters into their own hands, and use external cloud-based tools to share data, rather than relying on their own IT platform. Although these employees have the company’s best interests at heart, the use of consumer-focused file-sharing without proper oversight can lead to loss of data and intellectual property, and increased business risk in general.

Businesses are thus demanding collaboration tools that are easy to use and can be incorporated into existing workflows and IT structures with the right level of security and audibility.

Enhanced collaboration, however, on its own might not be enough. Employees must have access to the right applications, the right tools, to get the job done effectively and efficiently, and engender exceptional wins like Germany’s victory over Brazil.

Comidor is a Cloud Enterprise Collaboration tool and Multi-Application Suite that has been called the “Swiss Army knife” of information systems. The program, leased as Software as a Service, contains modules for Collaboration (Organizational, Company Communication, Document Management,Business and Social Enterprise tools, etc.), Project Management (Gantt, Burndown, and Milestones charts, Requirements, Project Deliverables, Workload, Resource and Cost Management, Reporting and Analytics tools, ect.), CRM and finance (Sales force and Visual Tools, Income, Expense, Cashflow, and Budgeting, etc.), and Business Intelligence Analytics. Comidor has been fully developed in XML and Java, and therefore does not present the potential weaknesses of consumer-focused cloud-based platforms, while retaining all their inherent strengths. It is, essentially, the right tool at the right time.

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In the past, managers used to schedule a meeting for almost everything simply because they wanted to be assured that the engaged personnel had all necessary information, resources and a clear idea of what needs to be done. Luckily, in the era of collaboration platforms meetings have been gradually mutated from communication tools to “get things done” tools. Replace “things” with job, contracts, requirements, deliverables and so forth and you have an idea. As resources and information are dealt through wikis, video conferencing, document sharing, activity streaming etc. in a semi-automated manner, there is a shift from internal meetings (within the team) to external ones (with the company’s customers, partners, suppliers etc).

The benefits from this shift are enormous:

• At least cut in half the total time spent in meetings. This also helps in productivity!
• Managers can now focus on external meetings
  • Better prepared for customers/partners etc.
  • Explore past information and statistics offered by the platform
• All work (presentations/produced) for the upcoming meeting is shared and notified to the right people in a neat and fully organized manner
• All post meeting information is shared and exploited instantly by the right people
• Filtered information is used as feedback for marketing and CRM activities (campaigns, social media posts etc.)
• Meetings and associated material are linked to tasks, events, contacts, accounts etc. increasing the overall traceability
• Meetings’ activity history can be obtained easily for analysis and further marketing process improvement with powerful Business Intelligence tools

Did collaboration platforms changed managers life? It depends on the manager actually and its willingness to adopt and to adapt to something new and promising. If this is the case then definitely, it’s not a matter of old dog new tricks stereotype as true managers constantly re-generate themselves through projects and stay always “fresh”.  I would rather reverse the stereotype and boldly state that senior managers quickly embraced collaboration tools and saw the full potential of work de-centralization and team members’ empowerment. Juniors are the ones that due to lack of self- confidence and “combat” experience have the tendency to approach projects with a centralized attitude.

Collaboration platforms have been designed and built around team management and workspace formation. So whether you’re a junior or an old dog doesn’t really matter. Your collaboration platform will eventually teach you how to effectively manage your team.

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It is called INSECURITY. You want extra insurance that “this” mail is not going to be lost. That this e-mail rests securely in more than one server. I’m with you on this 100% and yes I feel like the grandpa who puts the bucks under his mattress…But there is an inherent issue with this approach as you end up having to sustain the same information in a “repository” not intended for this purpose.

So, business mails in the business account and “other” mails in their account right? Wrong. What are these “other” mails? Unless you’re a secret agent and the “other” stuff should be secretly kept from everyone (even from you), you should explore them as business “assets”.

I mean, why you allow everyone’s opinion to affect your business through your trendy platform integrations with (facebook, LinkedIn, twitter etc) but you’re shutting the door to information that you should trust more – it’s your private e-mail account remember? You shouldn’t by any means. Every bit of information poured down to you can and should be exploited. Why you don’t try the other way round and incorporate your “private” and business mails into your collaboration/ CRM/ tasks management SaaS system – You have one right?

Most of the collaboration, CRM, tasks management systems give you the ability (through their APIs), to incorporate your gmail, exchange, yahoo etc. accounts as it is of utmost importance to have all information integrated. This way you are able to pass information contained in e-mails to colleagues, create tasks, notifications and so forth.

What I really like the most is exploring what I call the “path to knowledge”. You’ll be amazed to see how far (horizontally and vertically) this information, contained in a single mail, can go and how many people can benefit from it and how much it affects their productivity. And that is the magic provided by the true collaboration platforms. The ability to integrate, share, link and create knowledge as well as the capacity to track the knowledge’s activity history!

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It is anticipated that 2014 will be the “point of no return” year where most of the collaboration enabling technologies along with their associate models will be unconditionally adopted by Enterprises of any size. Major established SaaS vendors are already harvesting the benefits of this vast and yet unexplored market, and are building their arsenal for the upcoming all out war with the new comers in the collaboration services arena.

Vendors are moving towards the social workflow management trend, encompassing the traditional social and file sharing toolsets into one common platform. This focus enable the deployment of classical real-time collaboration tools into use cases far beyond the strict collaboration realm, such as project management,CRM, customer communication and monitoring etc.

Below we present the most indicative collaboration market state of the art solutions:

1.      SharePoint 2010:

Pros: SharePoint 2010 is primarily an ECM suite with strong collaboration features. It is the natural choice for Micorsoft customers, as it offers seamless integration with other Microsoft solutions. SharePoint gives enough scalability through third-party applications, and freedom on deployment options including on-premise and SaaS options.

Cons: SharePoint Foundations is free but with limited functionality forcing enterprises to opt for SharePoint Server.

2.      IBM Social Business:

Pros: Enterprises grasp the benefits of IBM Connections’ modular architecture to select the most appropriate collaboration modules for their needs. Strong embedded recommendation engine for knowledge items streaming and tracking, coupled with idea management system.

Cons: Collaboration features are not at the state of the art level, lacking content tagging system, and basic mobile offerings.

3.      Cisco WebEx Social 3.0:

Pros: WebEx Social fully supports BYOD through HTML5 and dedicated customized applications. Its powerful tagging and sharing engine allows the creation, sharing tagging and tracking of single instances of content across employees.

Cons: Lack of social workflow and task management capabilities

4.      OpenText:

Pros: Strong content management, versioning control and analytics on usage rates. Seamless integration with SharePoint and OpenText ECM.

Cons: True and advanced real-time collaboration is only achieved through integration with third-party solutions. Task management and social workflow management are currently not supported.

5.      StreamWork:

Pros: Probably the king in social workflow management coupled with project management and analytics capabilities, StreamWork provides the necessary bridges for integration with the well known third party apps like Google Docs, SharePoint, WebEx etc. It offers strong capabilities for page customization and a plethora of APIs available to developers for legacy systems integration.

Cons: No live audio/video capabilities.

6.      Salesforce Chatter:

Pros: With its ability to form groups with externals (customers, partners, providers etc.) it is the primary choice for enterprises focused on customer tracking and monitoring. Mobile capabilities and activity streaming is above the state of the art while integrates well with SharePoint.

Cons: Content management and real-time communication (audio/video) capabilities are primitive.

7.      Socialtext:

Pros: Above the state of the art collaboration capabilities focused on knowledge networks creation and social tagging. It provides excellent integration with SharePoint and a variety of cloud deployment options.

Cons: Basic to primitive content management and real-time collaboration capabilities.

8.      Podio:

Pros: Podio provides an e-mail centric notification engine handling all collaboration tasks.  Basic task and workflow management are available along with an interface for creating/modifying apps that can be added to the Podio home screen for iPhone.

Cons: Limited real-time communication and file searching. No integration with SharePoint.

9.       Comidor:

Pros: Comidor is a cloud application suite that combines Collaboration, Project Management, CRM, Business Intelligence and Document Management functionalities all in one platform. It is based on the Enterprises’ organizational structure, such as Departments, Groups, Teams etc., and employs various Social Network tools to achieve fast and easy task management and information sharing and tracking. It also provides tools and functionalities to keep track of productivity.

Cons: Due to its plethora of tools and functionalities cannot be considered purely as a collaboration platform. Comidor is ideal for SMEs in need of an integrated cloud suite covering most of their daily business needs.

Sources

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