3 Ideas for Enhancing Collaboration Between Staff

Poor collaboration can lead to a host of problems—from low productivity to tension and conflict in the team. Nobody wants to work with people they can’t stand. That’s why improving collaboration between teams is a must. If you want your employees to be better at work and to work together much more efficiently, you’ll need to help. Improving the way they collaborate is a good place to start. Here are some ideas to get you started:

 

Create a team channel

It could be an open forum or chat room where teams can connect to each other and say hi or just shoot the breeze, CIO suggests. The point is to provide your staff with an avenue where they can send and share information. This shouldn’t be done through email, though. And chats, while useful for quick, friendly interaction, isn’t all that geared to foster deeper employee closeness and engagement. Instead, try integrating video into your daily communication tools. Video meetings and chats provide face to face communication which helps improve relationships between employees. After all, you work better when you work with people you trust. And face to face interaction with video meetings improves helps build on that trust. You feel much closer to people when you can identify them visually, making that connection much more intimate. Compare that to the level of connection you feel to people on your email contact list, some of which you’ve never even seen, much less talked to anywhere else other than through email or chat. Against that, video meetings win, hands down. Also, with video, body language helps lessen misunderstandings, so people can work that much faster and better. So create a channel where your employees could air out their thoughts and get to know their offsite team mates much better. And to make things even better, start integrating video calls, meetings and chats into your communication apps and tools as soon as possible.

 

Use a work board

The Entrepreneur says one of the possible hurdles to effective collaboration are inefficient tools. From updating excel sheets every day to compiling project status reports and deliverables, there is a lot that goes behind ensuring that your team is on schedule and on track. However, those tools might not be making it easy for you to get the job done. That’s where getting tools like a digital workboard like Trello comes to mind. With a tool like that, you can easily assign tasks, monitor the progress of everyone for that day and see who’s lagging behind and who’s already done for the day. The interface also simulates the experience of using a real work board, allowing you to assign and transfer tasks with ease. From color-coded columns that help you identify specific projects to a tactile experience that makes it enjoyable, this one seems to be a good option for teams that want to improve on their collaboration skills. No need for boring, endless sheets of Excel files. With a project management app like this, it’s easier for your teams to work together.

 

Use video conferencing

There’s nothing like video conferencing to help you bridge the gap between your employees. This is especially true for companies that have remote and offsite employees. In the past, companies had to either send their management leads to several branches in order to help foster good team relationships as well as to facilitate training. That’s a costly bit of business, though. After all, you had to pay for fare and other transportation costs. Then the company would have to shell out allowance for food and lodgings. And if the training or meetup needs a larger venue to accommodate a huge team, then there’s the cost of renting a venue as well. All those add up to a hefty bill.

With video conferencing, management teams can easily reach out and stay in touch with their employees, wherever they happen to be. With the access video solutions offer, remote employees, too, can feel much closer to the company and the rest of their team mates. And the closer they feel, the harder they’ll work. The more they’ll improve. When people already love what they do and work with people they like or feel comfortable with, it can make a massive difference. With the use of services from industry leaders like BlueJeans, a business video conferencing solution for IT teams can drastically improve collaboration. What’s more, with content-sharing features that make it possible for your team to send content—photos, files, videos, pdfs and more—collaborating on a project has never been easier.

 

Collaboration helps team productivity. So if you think your team has problems working on joint projects, suffers from constant misunderstandings or just isn’t clicking together, you might want to start encouraging them on the use of video meetings and conferencing to turn things around.