One of the greatest strengths of our species is our diversity, as it allows us, as a race, to be good at everything, rather than having only a few specialties. Business is no different in this regard, which is why you hire a wide array of employees, each responsible for a different aspect of the organization, rather than hiring only designers or accountants. This is why collaboration is so effective in business, as it can allow your company to not only specialize in one area of expertise, but actually cater to a far wider audience.
The Power of Teamwork and Collaboration
Collaboration offers a wide variety of benefits, and can greatly improve your organization’s efficiency and capabilities. The following, with few shared by CIO, are just a few of the ways in which teamwork can help your business and employees thrive.
- Accommodates for any Weaknesses in your Teams
One of the greatest advantages of collaboration and teamwork is that not every member has to be good at everything, and you can mix up a diverse group with a wide variety of talents and strengths – all able to complement each other’s talents and strengths. In order to do that, it’s crucial you understand each individual’s communication, working, and learning style. If you have this level of transparency as a team supervisor or manager, it will enable you to set goals that focus on each team member’s strengths, which will result in more efficient and satisfying work. There are many excellent personality assessments (like those offered by Tilt 365) that you could use as part of this team-building process. When used correctly, these tools can in fact add great value to your team-building efforts. Therefore, try to find a diverse group with a wide array of strengths, so that each member can step up to accommodate for weaknesses in other members, and the group as a whole will be able to handle a wide variety of different problems or projects.
- Encourages more Personal and Effective Relationships
As a business leader, you understand how important it is to encourage or help teams build trust and cohesiveness, as these characteristics allow employees to be more candid and genuine with their ideas. However, trust and cohesiveness are not easy to build, and require employees to develop more personal relationships – which can be difficult when communications are limited to impersonal phone calls and email. As such, as Branding Magazine agrees, by acquiring the right tools to allow for more personal communication, you greatly enhance your team’s ability to work together and strive towards a shared goal.
- Allows Employees to Learn from Each Other
When employees work together in a personal setting, one of the greatest advantages is that they can teach and learn from each other. This carries two distinct benefits. Primarily, your employees become more capable without you having to invest in further training. Additionally, employees can enjoy more job satisfaction as they better themselves with each project they collaborate on. So next time you are considering creating a team to collaborate on a project, don’t simply think about capabilities, but contemplate on the fact that some of your employees may be able to learn a lot from working with others within similar or completely different departments.
- Boosts Productivity as Multiple Minds Simultaneously Solve Problems
When working alone, it’s easy to overlook an aspect or bit of information pertaining to the project. And without another person’s perspective on a matter, you may get stuck in rut, trying to solve a problem with the same approach. When collaborating, however, you have multiple minds working together, with different perspectives all analyzing and evaluating every aspect. This helps each member realize more than they would have alone, as bits of information that they may have brushed past, or ideas they may have overlooked, may be brought into focus. So never underestimate the power of collective intelligence and teamwork when it comes to complex or difficult problems or projects.
Acquiring the Right Tools to Allow for Effective Collaboration
One of the greatest things about collaboration is that we, as a social species, are innately good at it. However, collaboration in business throughout the years has been extremely limited by the technologies that existed. Fortunately, in our modern age, we can almost perfectly replicate the experience of working together in the same room and even on the same computer, despite great distances between people. So allow your employees to take advantage of their natural skills and work together with others to produce a standard of quality that would never have been achievable alone, by investing in quality business video conferencing solutions from a reputable brand like BlueJeans. This will not only offer fantastic benefits to your business’ productivity, efficiency and profits, but will also help your employees enjoy more job satisfaction as they achieve more and perform at their very best. Just be sure to invest in quality hardware, software and services so that your workforce aren’t limited, but are instead empowered by the many benefits that such modern technologies can offer.
Getting your teams to work effectively may require hard work, but will be worth the investment of time, effort and capital when, together, they achieve more than ever before. Just be sure to acquire the right tools to allow for effective collaboration and communication, and don’t be scared to encourage teamwork by explaining precisely how working together will add value to the process.
