4 tips to build a ‘collaborative culture’ in your business

While there are many factors that play a role in creating an ideal office culture, few are more important than building a culture of collaboration. In fact, a Stanford study found that working in a collaborative setting makes employees 50% more effective at completing tasks, while also increasing their engagement and motivation.

It may sound cliche, but it’s true: your team is the lifeblood of your business. Regardless of your industry, building a healthy office culture driven by collaboration is key to your company’s success. Positive work cultures have been found to increase productivity, engagement, retention and other important statistics.

Building a culture of collaboration in your business is well worth the effort – and with the right practices, you can quickly strengthen this aspect of your business.

1. Establish a foundation of trust and communication

As a leader, you set the tone for how collaboration works in your organization. Similar to building strong partnerships with other businesses, an internal collaborative culture requires a strong foundation of constant communication and transparency.

But that doesn’t mean every employee needs to know your company’s financial details. But instead of trying to limit access to information unnecessarily, it means sharing the information everyone needs to do their job well. A transparency commitment matrix can help your team decide what to share and with whom.

Creating coherent knowledge to share information can also be useful. Even something as simple as weekly email updates or check-in meetings with the entire team can keep everyone on the same page and provide more opportunities to collaborate.

2. Create opportunities for a collaborative culture

Collaboration doesn’t happen by accident—especially if you’re still breaking out of a system where employees work on independent projects.

As a leader, you can foster collaboration by intentionally designing projects that require a team of workers. This can be especially useful when creating a cross-functional task force that requires members of different departments to work together on a common goal or initiative. Even something as simple as assigning a few team members to work together on a project can be beneficial.

As the saying goes, “Experience is the best teacher.”

These early collaboration exercises you create for your team may require additional guidance, but they serve as a great testing ground for learning to work together. As your team becomes more comfortable with this process, they’ll be better equipped to cross-task, and more willing to collaborate in small ways on their individual tasks.

3. Use technology to make collaboration seamless

You are not alone in your quest to create a collaborative culture. For example, a wide range of technology tools like Slack, Asana, and Mural are now available to facilitate and simplify the collaboration process, whether you all share the same office space or work remotely. One trend that many companies are turning to is the use of “no-code” and “low-code” business process management platforms that can be uniquely customized for individual teams.

Jason Dren, Practice Lead at ExpressAbility, explains how custom business apps can go a long way to driving more meaningful collaboration. “Processes and productivity suffer if teams don’t have a way to collaborate, have visibility into processes, or simply contribute individually. To avoid that, business tools must be tailored to fit the team and collaboration must be truly seamless. When businesses use low-code BPM platforms, they can quickly find software development that fits people, not the other way around. This allows businesses to better respond to a changing marketplace through collaboration that increases productivity.

4. Review and revise

As with any change or initiative your business makes, you should regularly review your processes to build a culture of collaboration. Before, during, and after you start emphasizing collaboration, you should review your business processes to identify areas that are highly individualized, as well as areas where your current systems or processes make collaboration difficult.

Your employees’ feedback will be critical in this endeavor. Gathering feedback from your team can help you identify gaps and opportunities for greater collaboration in your efforts to build a culture of collaboration. Better yet, the process of gathering feedback improves collaboration by helping your team grow more comfortable communicating and coming up with solutions together.

Naturally, once you’ve conducted your own assessments and gathered feedback from this team, the next step is to revise your processes to make collaboration easier. Make sure the “revision” process is self-paced by gathering insights and recommendations from all stakeholders to ensure your new solutions are effective for everyone.

Achieve more with a collaborative culture

Building a collaborative culture in your business can take a fair amount of effort, especially if your organization has previously focused on individual-oriented activities.

But when you work hard to create a more collaborative culture, your team can thrive like never before. From unlocking creativity to improving satisfaction and engagement at work, a collaborative culture can help you get better results from your team — and from yourself.