10 top tips for improving business collaboration

The key ingredient for a business to grow and be successful is when employees come together for the greater good. Business collaboration enables employees to work together to solve problems and achieve their goals to grow. If you’re in a larger organisation, it’s crucial for improving workplace relationships and eliminating any departmental divides. 

Business collaboration has been proven to increase productivity and ROI, and a whole host of other benefits including improved business communication and connectivity. Right now, having a platform in place that enables business collaboration is essential to become more agile.

There are examples of traditional business collaboration such as email, brainstorming and peer reviews, but with the advancement in technology, it’s now easier than ever to promote collaboration in the workplace. Here are our top 10 tips for encouraging collaboration in the workplace;

1. Implement a business collaboration platform 

There are many tools available that encourage collaboration in the workplace; the obvious ones being instant messaging and video call platforms such as Slack, Teams and Zoom. But to truly reap the benefits, you should look at implementing a dedicated business collaboration platform such as an intranet. 

An intranet platform has many purposes; to keep employees informed and connected to an organisation, act as a communication tool and to enable collaboration.

So, let’s look at how to improve collaboration in the workplace. With Oak’s intranet solution, the possibilities of promoting business collaboration and connectivity within an organisation are endless. Social feeds, community hubs, personalised timelines and unified document storage are just a few features that can help.

2. Team building 

To maximise the impact of business collaboration, you need to nurture a team that works well together. Team building creates stronger bonds between your employees and strengthens workplace relationships, leading to higher productivity. If your team doesn’t have the digital tools to work effectively with one another regardless of where they are based, you’re not going to see the full potential of business collaboration. 

Consider setting up team building activities such as challenges or getting your team together or online to solve a fictitious problem. Remember, these activities don’t have to break the bank! Enabling your team to get together outside of their daily tasks to connect and work on fun tasks together, will help when it comes to working on a big project which requires collaboration from all employees.

3. Share the business vision

Making sure your employees are involved in every aspect of your business is crucial to improve collaboration in the workplace. This is why you should always share the business vision and keep your employees informed about what is going on within the business. 

Sharing the business vision and the positive impact it can have on your employees can motivate them to make more meaningful contributions at work. Knowing that they play a part in a bigger picture can be a catalyst for better cross-business collaboration, whether this is on internal initiatives or wider external projects.

Using a digital platform to communicate your business vision, objectives and updates can become the backbone of your internal comms strategy. From this point you can ensure that all communications and news shared in specific areas of your intranet reflect the company vision and the bigger picture.

You can always keep your people updated using an employee intranet or employee engagement app where they can contribute to the conversation, giving them a key place to share ideas and give feedback.

4. Encourage departmental interaction

If you’re working in a large organisation with many different departments or business units spread across broad geographical regions, it’s important to encourage interaction between these departments. 

Make sure employees have a go at ‘trading places’ with members of a different department so they can gain a perspective of what that department does and how they operate. Alternatively, you can use the social and community aspects of your employee app to provide a space for dispersed and deskless workers to share what it’s like on a typical day in their role or location. Employee-generated content can actually gather more intrigue than top-down comms, so it’s worth exploring.

Giving employees an insight into how different departments and job types work can enhance business collaboration and enable employees to work better together, whether they’re near or far.

5. Incorporate business collaboration into your culture 

If you want your employees to collaborate and work well together you should make sure business collaboration is a central feature of your company culture. Ensure you make this clear throughout your employee intranet by creating spaces dedicated to your company culture and values. Here, your employees can find the information easily and get an idea of what is expected of them to maximise cross-business collaboration. 

Remember to make this a focus in the intranet onboarding process too. This helps new employees to integrate into your culture and understand what is expected of them from the outset.

6. Value social interaction 

Although business collaboration is mainly focused on uncovering innovative ideas or collating multiple insights to achieve a shared goal, you should also value social interaction to strengthen relationships in your team. 

Investing in a business collaboration platform like an intranet not only helps you communicate with your employees more effectively, but it’s also a means for employees to socialise. With Oak’s employee engagement platform, the opportunities for social interaction at all corners of your company are far-reaching;

Instant messenger: 

Leave the days of back and forth emailing behind and continue the conversation through instant messenger. Messages can be sent to an individual user or a whole group; perfect for social interaction.

Hubs: 

With Hubs you can create an area dedicated to any kind of hobbies and common interests. Perfect for enhancing interaction and in turn, making people more comfortable with their colleagues which can lead to improved business collaboration. 

Social and community: 

Filter out all work-related information and have a feed dedicated to social interaction and activity. Here your team can create bonds and work on their team-building skills.

7. The power of mobile 

When it comes to improving business collaboration within your organisation, having a mobile intranet platform that can be accessed on-the-go is crucial. 80% of the global workforce is deskless meaning the majority of these workers don’t have access to a desktop or company email. This can lead to a large proportion of employees from a company missing out on key business updates and feeling disconnected from their workplace. 

Having an intranet that enables employees to access via mobile means that they can connect with their organisation at any time, they can use collaboration features such as messenger and timeline and receive important notifications and updates through push notifications.

8. Inspire with content 

Sending a message straight to the main timeline of your intranet telling your workforce about the benefits of business collaboration probably won’t have much impact. Instead, be creative with your content to inspire your employees to collaborate in the workplace. 

Whether this is through a video message from the CEO or visually appealing infographics to be shown on your main timeline, mixing up the content formats is something that will leave a lasting impression.

9. Lead by example 

Remember to always practice what you preach. You can preach about the benefits of business collaboration as much as you want, but without your employees seeing you practice the behaviour first, you’re not going to see results. 

Demonstrate behaviour of workplace collaboration in any way possible; setting up team-building exercises, sharing information on your business collaboration platform and encouraging others to share ideas in meetings.

10. Reward  your employees 

Showing recognition to those who have had a great impact in improving collaboration in the workplace will help to maintain behavioural change. Reward your employees for doing their bit, whether it’s in your annual awards ceremony or quick note of thanks, it feels good to be appreciated. Oak’s employee recognition software is a much-loved tool for this. Not only does this motivate your employees, but it’s also a great sense of achievement.

Now that you know how to improve collaboration in the workplace, what are you waiting for?

Right now, business collaboration is essential for organisations that want to see their results skyrocket. With expectations of the modern workplace ever-evolving, there is no excuse not to experiment with collaboration in your organisation using tech. Find the right business collaboration platform for you and you’ll be sure to get the most out of your workforce.

Want to see how Oak could help enhance collaboration within your organisation?