How to Master the Art of Employee Collaboration

Businesses quickly run into trouble when their people stop collaborating. 

In fact, 86% of workers say ineffective collaboration and communication is the main cause of workplace failures.

Want to make sure your organization doesn’t fall into this trap? 

Read on to discover how to master the art of employee collaboration.

How to build a collaborative culture

Your company culture plays a huge part in how collaborative your teammates are with each other.

Here’s how to make sure you’re fostering an environment that encourages your people to share their hard-earned insights with their teammates:

Trust

Trust is key when it comes to employee collaboration. 

If your people think they might put their job at risk for speaking their mind they’re unlikely to be very open to collaborating on anything they don’t strictly have to within their job description.

Establish a company culture that leaves each and every one of your employees feeling safe to speak their mind and you’ll start to see a lot more collaboration across your business.

Open communication

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. 

Want your people to be open books, sharing their insights and industry knowledge with their colleagues for the benefit of the business?

Then you’re going to have to do exactly the same thing.

The fact is: most businesses have a collaboration problem because most businesses don’t operate like this.

They keep their employees at arm’s length from top-level decisions and the thought processes behind them. 

But 84% of people say the way leaders behave is the single most important factor influencing behavior across their organizations.

So, if you want to encourage more collaboration, be sure to lead by example and communicate openly and honestly with your people at all times.

A shared vision

Wondering how to motivate employees? It all starts with selling them on an exciting vision.

And yet only 48% of people can recite their organization’s vision. And a massive 85% of workers say they aren’t even sure what their organization is trying to achieve.

A lot of leaders shy away from setting an ambitious goal and sharing it with their team. After all, will your people not lose confidence in your abilities if you set unrealistic goals for your business and then they all watch as you fail to hit them?

But the fact is: the best leaders in the world don’t have everything figured out. And they embrace it. 

That’s because they know that 39% of employees actually wish they had more involvement in contributing to their company’s vision and values.

That’s right – your employees don’t expect you to have all the answers. They just want you to ask the right questions. 

Questions like:

• What do you want this company to stand for?
• What impact do you want us to have on the world?
• What should we be aiming for – and how should we be getting there?

Your people don’t want to work hard to help you achieve your vision. But you better believe they’ll go the extra mile to do their bit to help achieve a collaborative vision they’ve had a hand in creating.

Utilizing technology for collaboration

Collaboration is a lot easier with the right tools.

Here are the seven tools today’s most effective organizations are using to transform their team's communication and collaboration:

Knowledge base

A knowledge base houses all your business's important information, guidelines, and processes in the cloud. 

Without one, your people are bound to:

• Spend hours searching for files they need to do their jobs…
• And waiting for colleagues to fill them in on information they need to make progress on a project they're working on.
• Work from SOPs they saved on their computer years ago and are now out of date.

If a knowledge hub is the only tool you add to your collaboration tech stack you could still transform how your business operates.

Idea portal

An idea portal is another essential bit of collaboration software. It breaks down knowledge silos and makes it easy to collect, evaluate, and develop the best ideas your organization has to offer. 

Assembly’s idea portal is inspired by Amazon’s “working backwards” approach. Implement our idea management flow and you’ll receive your people’s bright ideas in the form of a press release, helping make sure it’s connected to your customers’ needs.

Employee recognition tools

A massive 40% of people say they'd put more energy into their work if they were simply recognised more often.

Which is why empowering your people with tools like our free recognition and rewards software is a simple but effective way to boost team collaboration, employee happiness, and work motivation across your organization. 

CEO and Executive updates

The research is clear. Your people will work harder, stick around for longer, and contribute more of their ideas if you keep them in the loop on your organization’s strategy and direction. 

And that’s where CEO and Executive updates come in. Giving your people an insight into what you’ve been doing and thinking about that week will encourage them to be more open with their colleagues. Plus, if they know what your plans are, they can volunteer ideas they have that might help you succeed.

Workplace news feed

A workplace news feed – which functions like a private social media feed that curates everything that’s going on in your organization – is one of the most effective collaboration tools in the HR toolbox. 

It makes it easy to keep everyone up to date about what’s happening in your business. Plus, it encourages collaboration by making it easy for your employees to comment and react to posts, as well as publish their own.

AI tools

We’re just scratching the surface of what AI can do for our HR initiatives. 

But we’ve already launched a few AI tools that can help you today.

Dora AI is a chatbot that supercharges your knowledge base by empowering your people to quickly get answers to questions relating to their work rather than having to search for them.

Plus, our free Assembly Recognition Assistant GPT can help you craft a thoughtful message recognizing an employee’s hard work in minutes

These AI tools aren’t a substitute for an employee collaboration strategy. But they can help supercharge your collaboration efforts once you’ve got the foundations in place. 

Strategies for effective communication

Making effective communication the norm across your business takes a lot of work.

But these three strategies will help you get there a lot faster:

Active listening

75% of global employers say that active listening is a crucial skill in the modern workplace. And for good reason – it encourages empathy and helps make absolutely sure everyone involved in a conversation is on the same page. 

So, it’s well worth running actively listening workshops with your people to help improve this essential collaboration skill across your organization. 

In short, active listening involves:

• Leaving any preconceived biases at the door
• Giving the conversation your full attention
• Adopting open and receptive body language
• Summarizing what the speaker says to make sure you understand them 

If your peoples’ conversations all share these hallmarks of active listening then effective collaboration will come easy to them.

Fostering open dialogue

Want your teammates to collaborate more? Then you're going to need to cultivate a company culture that makes them feel comfortable speaking candidly about the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of your business.

Unfortunately, there’s no overnight fix if you feel like your employees aren’t comfortable opening up at work. Your only option is to put in the work building a stronger company culture.

Fix the problems that come up

Failing to fix the issues your teammates raise about your business after you’ve asked them to speak up more could seriously damage the trust they have in you.

On the other hand, if you solve the problems an employee flags, they’re a lot more likely to open up about more issues – and encourage their teammates to do the same. This will help kick-start an even more collaborative culture.

The final word

Empowering your people with the tools they need to collaborate effectively – and the psychological safety that comes from knowing their employer truly cares about their opinion – can transform your organization.

Bake the tools and strategies we’ve highlighted here into your business to quickly master the art of employee collaboration.

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