Five key benefits of collaboration

Collaboration lies at the heart of successful teamwork. It happens when a group of people come together to work towards a shared project, sharing their skills, knowledge and expertise.

But collaboration doesn’t just happen naturally. For collaboration to work successfully, a range of different skills are required including open communication, effective goal setting and skillful project management.

In the hybrid work environment, practices have had to ensure they have in place the right software tools such as Teams and SharePoint so that irrespective of where individuals are working, teams can collaborate effectively.

For certain projects, collaboration can be improved by bringing people together in person.  This has been seen to be particularly useful where the generation of new ideas or new ways of working are needed.  Also for new hires, face-to-face collaboration can be an excellent way for them to get to know their colleagues better and get them used to working in partnership with team members across different departments.

So what are the five key benefits of collaboration?

1.       Builds a team ethos

Most professional firms are structured in a way that separates different technical specialisms into separate departments. Whilst this can enable working efficiencies within those departments and allow them to become centres of specialist expertise, it can also lead to a breakdowns in communication and a lack of teamwork between those departments, with a ‘silo’ mentality emerging.  Bringing people together from different departments that might not normally work together to collaborate on a shared project can help create connections and improve communication between those teams.  It can also encourage a team ethos to develop between those teams and across the firm as a whole.

2.       People learn from each other

When teams collaborate they have the opportunity to learn from each other – about differences in the way they approach their work, the way they think, their priorities, their challenges – all of which can help to improve the way they work together in the future.

On our in-house training workshops at 3Qhub, we regularly come across occasions where our workshop is the first time people from different departments from within the firm have actually collaborated together, even though they may have worked at the same firm for many years!  The workshop becomes the catalyst for future collaboration and improved inter-departmental communication on their return to the office.

3.       Helps solve problems

One of the intrinsic reasons for getting people to collaborate is that it helps to solve problems, particularly where a range of different skills, knowledge and expertise are required in finding the solution.  This collaboration can take the form of an ad-hoc, informal chat between two colleagues trying to sort out a problem that has just cropped up or a more formalised project team put together for the specific purpose of achieving a particular goal. In either case, it is down to the collaboration of the participants that helps achieve the solution. And it isn’t just the combination of different technical abilities that can help in collaboration; it also helps having a range of personality types who can each bring a different perspective to the task.  Someone with high levels of emotional intelligence and teamworking skills can help bring about cohesion in a group that might be experiencing division and disruption. Someone with a creative mindset can come up with original ideas and alternative approaches to solving problems that someone with a more analytical approach might never have thought of.

4.       Builds trust, confidence and morale

Working with people outside of your immediate team is an important way of building confidence and trust across those teams.  Where people trust each other they are more likely to want to collaborate which in turn helps to build morale within those teams and across the firm as a whole.  A more motivated workforce leads to better individual and business performance, which in turn makes the firm a more attractive place to work, improving employee retention rates and making it more appealing to new talent.

5.       Improves efficiencies

Collaborative working is not always the best solution. Where a task needs completing and the employee has the necessary skillset, mindset and resources to do so independently in the timeframe required then to get others involved would be an inefficient use of resources. However many tasks are of a size or complexity that they require a range of skills and resources to enable them to be completed efficiently, and in that context collaboration will be the right approach.

As the saying goes “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Collaboration forms an integral element of my3Q membership, our on-demand video library.  Your team is encouraged to watch the videos together and use the 3Qhub Collaboration Tool to help draw out learning from the group and the 3Qhub Development Action Plans for them to capture the main takeaway points.

You can find our more information regarding my3Q membership and its benefits here my3Q Membership (3qhub.com)

The importance of collaboration will also be one of the topics discussed at the forthcoming 3Qhub Conference ‘Managing and Leading in the Hybrid Environment’ on 7 July 2022.  The conference will provide an ideal chance to network with managers and leaders from other firms and learn from their experiences of collaboration in their practices.

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