Collaboration in Culture and Practice
Creating value, investing in ideas, and discovering untapped internal
knowledge by enabling teams to work together.
In today’s business environment, it’s nearly impossible to have
a conversation about evolved practices without discussing
collaboration.
More than ever, companies are embracing the value of having more than one mind
tackling a business problem. They see the potential in working with partners and vendors
and other stakeholders to create new products or new services. They certainly embrace
the idea that their employees and teams will work more effectively and be exponentially
more innovative if they’re empowered to work together.
In fact, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that better collaboration could increase
productivity of interaction workers by up to 25%, and translate into nearly $600 billion
dollars in value across commercial sectors alone.
1
Yet organizations still struggle to create an environment in which collaboration thrives.
How can we change that and build organizations that nurture and encourage rich
collaboration and knowledge sharing?
It’s all about enabling people.
What Is Collaboration, Exactly?
By definition, collaboration is simply the act of working with someone else to create
something.
In business, that definition gets expanded a bit to imply that the product of collaboration
creates value that wasn’t there before, and that wouldn’t necessarily be possible through
individual efforts alone.
In the era of social business, we often think of collaboration as a key characteristic shared
by the most progressive companies. These are the businesses that believe that fluid,
open communication and constant knowledge exchange throughout the organization is
imperative to thriving in today’s environment.
The benefits of team collaboration are clear enough for organizations to aspire to be more
collaborative, but the practice of creating a collaborative culture is a challenging one.
The Struggle for Adoption
The emergence of social technologies has created an enthusiastic rush to capitalize on
all of their capabilities, from sharing to content creation to interaction, feedback, and
conversation.
Many companies have made significant investments in today’s robust social collaboration
technologies, from individual tools like real-time chat to full-blown platforms that include
robust features and capabilities.
The problem is that leading with technology is almost always a dead end, and leads to
frustrated initiatives that struggle to take hold and find a place in the day-to-day workflow
of teams and employees.
It’s a familiar scene; both the CRM and Enterprise 2.0 movements struggled for traction
for many of the same reasons. Proponents of those ideas rushed to adopt and implement
technology first, believing that the right platform with all the right features would be so
irresistible that employees would flock to it and use it in droves.
But it didn’t quite happen that way. Why?
Collaboration is a model first, and needs to be approached as set of values shared by
individual people who want to improve the quality, depth, and reach of their work through
collective effort. Which means that the very root of successful collaboration is not in the
technologies you use, but in the people that use them. Put more simply, collaboration is a
means, not an end.
Technology and platforms should enable people by improving their productivity, their
expression and communication, and their ability to easily access the information they
need from anywhere. These imperative components make up a successful collaboration
strategy and platform but need a strong cultural foundation to be used to their full
potential.
If we can shift our thinking to consider how and why people work successfully and
approach collaboration as a mindset, we’ll find a greater degree of success and deeper,
more sustainable adoption of whatever technologies suit the practices of the day.
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Collaboration as a Core Value
So, let’s reframe collaboration as a mindset and an organizational orientation. What does it
take to collaborate well?
Organizational Design
When you look at the way people work, it’s often very different than the way it’s written on
paper. All the boxes and lines on organizational charts are relatively meaningless when it
comes down to the daily practice of managing tasks and working toward solving business
problems.
Look carefully at the way your organization is designed in order to identify potential
bottlenecks in information flow, functional barriers that are created between departments
because of reporting relationships or hierarchies, or even individual team dynamics and
relationships among peers.
Enabling more fluid communication and knowledge sharing means removing barriers
between humans, which can be physical, organizational, or a combination of both. This is
where a combination of the right attitude, the right processes, and the right tools is pivotal.
Looking at the way your organization is designed on paper—and perhaps making some
adjustments—can provide more elbow room for encouraging collaboration in reality.
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Leadership and Management
Every manager and leader within an organization knows that they’re responsible for
achieving certain objectives. Those objectives are usually part of their job description, their
annual performance evaluation, even their financial compensation.
Professionals tend to invest their efforts in two things:
1. The things that they are compensated and rewarded for investing in; and
2. The things that give them an intrinsic sense of purpose, contribution and value as a
professional.
If we want our organizations to be more collaborative, we have to make it both a
leadership imperative and something that is attractive, interesting, and rewarding for those
leaders to do.
Company values and culture are established and socialized both from the top down
and from the roots of the organization upward (and outward). As collaboration’s value
increases in tomorrow’s businesses, we have to embed it as not just an activity, but as an
attitude that we foster through our actions, behavior, and consistent language.
We can try to mandate activity—“Collaborate or else!” or “You MUST participate on the
company platform”—but we can’t mandate mindset. That’s something that has to be
cultivated and encouraged at all levels of an organization.
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Individual Investment
As individuals, we are wired first to look at most situations through a personal lens.
Organizations are perpetually strapped for resources, and always asking their employees to
do more with less.
When it comes to collaboration in the workplace, the most prominent question in an
employee’s mind is often “How is this going to help me?” or sometimes more realistically,
“How much more work is this going to create for me?”
And while company objectives for collaboration can be motivating for the executive
board—cost savings, efficiencies, ideation and innovation—the individuals participating in
collaboration initiatives also need to be personally invested in the outcomes.
How will their jobs be made easier by collaborating? How will they feel a deeper sense of
individual achievement and contribution? How will they be recognized and rewarded for
their efforts? Are their opinions and ideas welcome even if they aren’t considered “experts”
in a topic? Share this information with them at the start of your collaboration program to
help ensure your employees are personally invested in collaboration.
Collaboration programs must be established from the point of view of the people who will
be charged with driving them: the employees themselves.
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One strong indicator of culture in a company is how the organization recognizes and
rewards contributions to the overall success of the business.
A collaborative organization values—and therefore invests in—recognition for teams and
employees that embody collaborative characteristics: open communication, investment
in collective achievement, teamwork, shared accountability and credit, and free sharing of
expertise and specialized knowledge for the betterment of the organization.
Most traditionally hierarchical organizations reward individual achievement alone in the
form of salary raises or bonuses, individual promotions, performance evaluation, or awards
(like Employee of the Year). While those things can be incredibly valuable, individual
rewards alone tend to incent competition over cooperation, even in “collaborative” settings.
Truly fostering a collaborative culture requires thinking about ways to reward not just
individual contributions, but the achievements of groups - whether formal or informal when they work together to solve a problem or generate new ideas. That could also mean
recognizing effort rather than simply success, since many collaboration efforts can result
in projects that don’t take off, maybe for good reason, or initiatives that don’t necessarily
succeed.
The impact is in openly and enthusiastically encouraging the behavior of collaboration in
your organization so that individuals know that working together is not only encouraged,
but formally supported and recognized as a key part of the business.
5 Ways To Foster Collaboration in Your Organization
Shifting a culture is not an overnight project, and establishing a more collaborative
approach to business is a process, not a project. Instilling new and different cultural values
in an organization is an effort that takes several years, and is an ongoing quest rather than
a firm destination.
So if that’s true, how do you start with practical actions that can establish that culture in
realistic, manageable pieces? Think in terms of initiatives that are concrete in scope but
that demonstrate and depend on collaboration throughout. Collaboration then becomes
about not just talking about the value, but experiencing it through tangible efforts.
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1. Organizational self-awareness: The assessment
When was the last time you took a good, hard look at your organization and how you
equip your workforce to collaborate more effectively? It’s difficult to know where you’re
headed and how to get there if you don’t first know from where you’re starting.
Conducting a thorough Readiness Assessment for your company is a worthwhile first step.
Think of it like part survey, part discussion, part investigation and part exploration. Some of
the areas you might explore include:
• Cultural values: When you talk to people across the organization, how do they
describe your culture? How does it differ in varying levels of the organization, or across
departments or business units? Are those values in conflict or well-aligned? Are there
ways to balance them better?
• Leadership: How invested are your senior leaders in collaboration as a core component
of your culture? How do they describe “collaboration” and what do they see as its
benefits to the organization? Do their actions seem to support that vision, and if not,
where are the disconnects?
• Organizational structure: How are your departments and teams designed on paper?
Does that design enable or inhibit collaboration and how? Are there adjustments that
can be made to reduce friction in communication or reduce barriers to more collective
work effort?
• Roles: Are the “right people on the bus”? Are there gaps in skills, capabilities, or
personality and work style that need addressing? Do you feel like you have adequate
leadership and ownership potential for expanding your collaboration efforts internally?
• Knowledge & understanding: How well versed do you believe your teams to be in
collaboration? Are they enthusiastic or skeptical, or somewhere in between? Are there
successful collaboration projects taking place now, and what makes them successful?
Have there been failed projects in the past, and do you have a good understanding
of why they didn’t succeed? How much education will you need to do to socialize
collaborative values, approaches, and expectations?
• Available resources: Do you have the tools, budgets, processes and other infrastructure
necessary to expand your collaborative culture and projects? If not, what are you
missing?
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Gathering the information is likely to take several weeks and require the effort of many
people in many different roles. Evaluating and interpreting that information is likely to take
several more weeks. But at the end of the process, you’ll uncover hidden opportunities for
better and more useful collaboration, the potential obstacles that could stand in your way
(and which of those are moveable), and best of all, better understand how and why your
colleagues work the way they do so you can all work more effectively together.
2. Scenario planning
“What if...?”
It’s the question that sits at the center of many business discussions, especially when
exploring new ideas. Take social business as an example, one that many organizations
are exploring in depth right now. Most people want to understand the potential upside
of being a more transparent organization overall, the potential risks of integrating social
practices throughout their organization and the potential complications that could come
along with changing fundamental business practices in significant ways.
A practical way to attack this kind of problem is by doing a scenario modeling session.
Gather stakeholders from varying levels in the business or department, considering
carefully who might be indirectly impacted by social business efforts, or directly
accountable for their success. Bring in everyone from executive management through
your practitioners, from HR to marketing to legal and operations.
Bring in remote employees or employees in different offices virtually, and use video
conferencing to connect everyone in a face-to-face environment, since it’s really helpful
to see each other during these kinds of exercises. Then, brainstorm all of the best-case and
worst-case scenarios you can imagine that social business practices could create.
What if a collaboration project with a partner results in a strained relationship? What if
someone shares personal or confidential information on an open company platform or on
a social network? What if a customer helps you find a critical flaw—or an unprecedented
opportunity for—one of your key products?
Prioritize those scenarios. Then use a few of them to walk through in detail. You can post
the scenarios to a private workspace in your internal collaboration platform to continue
brainstorming the details, or you can post it to a wider group for ideating on additional
scenarios that might come up in the future as a sort of “living resource”.
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You’ll uncover interesting interpersonal dynamics and potentially limiting or incomplete
processes, resources, and decision paths. And you can use what you learn to devise
playbooks, guidelines, or other governance tools to help you better manage your
programs.
Most importantly, you’ll have demonstrated right out of the gate the value of gathering a
cross-disciplinary team to solve a business problem through collaboration. And once you
learn scenario modeling in practice, it’s a technique you can use to address unfamiliar
business situations anywhere, anytime.
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3. Frameworks
The very best, most successful and most sustainable collaborative cultures have invested
in the infrastructure that allows it to be part of who they are, not just what they do. For
many progressive companies, that means making “collaboration” not just something that’s
nice to have, but something that is deliberately designed for. In an organization that has
any level of complexity, that requires establishing both an accountability structure and a
way for each part of the organization to be represented in strategic direction and planning
efforts.
Consider designing a Collaboration Hub or laboratory in your organization that can
function as a collective authority and embassy for this mindset in your organization. Get
representation in the Hub from across your company (all those same groups you used in
your scenario modeling is a great start), and focus on involving those with a passion and
enthusiasm for what collaboration can help accomplish. They can and should meet and
work together on a regular basis, whether in person or virtually, and establish a vision and
goals for the group that align collaboration with core business objectives.
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The Hub can also become the entity responsible for evaluating resources, reporting
on initiatives to executive management, carrying back executive vision to share with
the group (if an executive isn’t a regular participant), and developing a comprehensive
collaboration program that considers mindset as well as practice, and how both can
become better established within the business.
By formalizing an infrastructure to support a collaboration culture, collaborators know
they have resources and organizational support for their efforts, and the company has a
scalable, sustainable structure that makes collaboration an integral function in the business
rather than an abstract idea.
4. Internal community: Finding experts in residence
You have a wealth of knowledge and expertise within your company, and much of it lies
beyond the boundaries of individual job descriptions. Fostering a collaborative culture
involves tapping into that knowledge freely and enthusiastically, and empowering
individuals to not only contribute based on their specific role, but to become advocates
for the potential of sharing and exchanging knowledge to improve outcomes and results
throughout the company.
Many organizations think about how collaboration can benefit their external initiatives:
sales, marketing, product innovation, partnerships. But one of the most powerful benefits
of collaboration is the establishment and nurturing of an internal community, engaging
and connecting employees so that they are not only more invested in their jobs but in the
culture and fabric of the organization.
Find your Experts in Residence in different topics, letting them self-identify, connect with
each other, and recognizing them as publicly and enthusiastically as possible. Task this
group with helping to establish education programs for the organization on different
topics, delivering workshops, webinars, or other interactive programs to help get other
people immersed in and excited about new areas of expertise. Allow them the time and
authority to explore topics outside their typical role to highlight the diversity of knowledge
in your organization and provide satisfying, enriching experiences for the Experts in
Residence.
They can also be an excellent resource for developing some best practices or guidelines
for collaboration within the company. Encourage your Experts in Residence to be
ambassadors for the platforms and technology you’ve invested in to show others what’s
possible with a combination of knowledge and tools.
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5. Pilot programs
Establishing cultural behaviors isn’t an overnight process. In fact, it can be quite a
challenge to do it through discussion and education alone. Teams and individuals need
to see, touch, and feel the benefits of collaboration first hand in order to make a personal
investment in it. And often, executive and leadership teams need to see how an initiative
will work in practice at a smaller scale before they’re willing to fund a broader-scale or
more permanent initiative.
One of the best ways to test the potential advantages and challenges of collaboration in
your organization is to establish a pilot project.
Choose a specific business challenge you’re trying to solve, like a plan for a new product
launch, or outlining an ongoing employee engagement initiative, or working with partners
to come up with more innovative ways to leverage those relationships. Then ask for
participants from all across the organization, at all levels, from the areas of the business
that will be impacted—either directly or indirectly—by the project.
Form a sort of ad-hoc project team that will be the “pilot crew” for this initiative. The more
cross functional and diverse this team can be, the better. Remember, you’re working to
solve a problem, but the long-term goal is to embed these kinds of approaches as cultural
values for the organization.
Meet regularly and consistently outline the goals, explain what sorts of things you hope to
demonstrate (i.e. using collaborative practices to solve these problems), and track what you
learn along the way, including both the challenges and the successes, many of which may
be unexpected.
Employ all the existing tools you have at your disposal, like web conferencing,
collaboration platforms, and internal social communities. Resist the urge to rely solely
on things like email for this purpose; you’re trying to show the potential of collaborative
work and technology, and email’s closed system won’t cut it in the collaborative work
environment.
Pilot programs can be excellent for helping to secure buy-in for larger projects, and for
demonstrating the real-world obstacles and benefits of having a collaborative culture. They
can be run for a fixed amount of time (ex. 6 months) or for a relative amount of time (ex.
until X goal has been achieved or a project milestone has been reached).
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The very practice of working together to solve a specific problem using collaboration
principles is an excellent way to introduce the idea of collaboration as a core value that
can be applied more universally.
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Collaboration Is Better Business
Collaboration is more than just a “thing you do”.
When it’s truly embraced as a core value for organizations, the spirit of working together,
collectively solving problems and contributing to the intelligence of the business
becomes simply a part of the spirit and mindset of the company. The future is in shifting
collaboration from simply an operational practice to a cultural value, and something that
we invest in with enthusiasm.
As organizations become flatter and more distributed, and as the social web is compelling
companies to be more nimble and adaptable, collaboration is and will continue to be a
critical cultural pillar that businesses need to have in place in order to not just survive, but
thrive.
1. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_social_economy
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Building a Collaborative Organization
Collaborating well means ensuring that your entire company is prepared to take advantage
of all of its opportunities. That means investing in not just operational improvements and
project plans, but building the right cultural foundation.
SideraWorks is the only firm dedicated to helping you adapt your organization to all of the
implications of the social web and collaborative technologies. We can help you conduct a
readiness assessment of your culture and existing programs, design a realistic collaboration
roadmap that puts adoption at the forefront, and deliver in-depth MasterClasses so that
your teams are educated and empowered to take on collaboration as a cause, not just a
project.
To learn more about SideraWorks services and expertise, visit sideraworks.com.
Collaborating with your team
As your company embraces collaboration as a mindset, collaboration technologies can
help you further implement collaboration company wide. Collaboration tools from Citrix
help workforces stay connected.
GoToMeeting allows you to meet face-to-face through video conferencing with anyone,
anywhere, from any device. GoToWebinar with video conferencing facilitates large online
meetings, like all-hands meetings, analyst briefings, and department updates, so your
employees can join live and stay up to date on company information no matter where
they are. And Podio connects teams and offices when they aren’t meeting online. With file
storing, task management, project management, instant messaging, Podio integrates with
ShareFile – a secure file sharing application that is accessible on any device – so you can
work securely with your team from anywhere.
To learn more about Citrix collaboration tools, visit www.citrix.com.
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