Research

• 86% of employees cite lack of collaboration for workplace failures, according to this study.

Statement

Enhancers of this driver

• A shared vision, mutual respect, and in-depth understanding of each other’s team’s input.
• A clear and concise workflow
• Clarity on roles and responsibilities
• Real-time feedback

Detractors of this driver

• Lack of a proper code-of-conduct regulating collaborative activities
• Miscommunication due to under communication
• Miscommunication due to overcommunication (especially by multiple parties - leading to mixed messages)
• Unnecessary, lengthy meetings
• Lack of a shared vision
• Silo-mentality
• Recognition and reward systems and structures that drive unhealthy inter-team competition

Individual

• Cultivate psychological safety around you. Avoid gossip and inflaming inter-team tensions.
• Mind the tone of your input to meetings. When there are no ‘silly’ questions to ask or ideas to share, collaborators are free to stretch their imaginations and find genuinely innovative solutions to challenging problems. There's greater room for growth, understanding, and effective collaboration with respectful consideration of ideas among all colleagues in a discussion.
• Avoid self-righteousness and be curious about the way other teams conduct themselves - avoid passing judgement without consideration.
• Check your intentions. Maintain the intention to be helpful and supportive wherever possible.

Leaders

• Collaborative behaviour must begin with senior leaders if it’s to be embraced by the rest of the organisation. To encourage collaboration, leaders first need to create a culture where anyone can ask questions, and there are no stupid questions. Employees need to feel like they have a voice to become receptive to opening up.
• Help employees understand the constraints and challenges faced by teams from different departments. Cultivate a sense of curiosity to help them learn about each other’s work and even develop ideas of how one team can improve their process to help other teams become more effective.
• Employees need to take ownership over tasks, seeing them through to completion and bearing responsibility for results, positive or negative. Managers must demonstrate personal accountability to set the tone and culture for the company

Organisation

• Keeping employees informed about what is going on within the company or during a project will increase the level of importance the employee feels within the workplace.
• Support trust in your organisation. Value consistency, reliability and values-driven ethical behaviours. Collaborative behaviour is more likely when there is a level of trust already established. With a culture of mutual trust and respect, there is a freer flow of communication and feedback throughout the organisation, allowing for greater performance and achievement towards goals.
• Inspire personal accountability - particularly for building cohesion and upholding psychological safety. By having policies to encourage personal accountability, employees work more efficiently on collaborative projects.
• Provide multiple ways for employees to share their thoughts. While some employees may be comfortable sharing their ideas in a meeting, others may prefer to have more time to think through their responses.
• You can encourage team members to share insights and ideas via email or through online collaboration tools, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, in addition to in-person discussions.
• Prevent information overwhelm and help with effectiveness by getting organisation-wide clarity on how to use these tools. Avoid ambiguity and misunderstandings by outlining which kinds of communication are suitable for different platforms.

• Every individual has an important part to play in supporting harmony between teams. Consider spending time “in their shoes.”
• Open conversations with enquiry rather than requests or demands.
• Team collaboration can break down when people feel like they have it harder than everyone else or feel like other teams/team members are trying to bring them down. The more you get to know your colleagues and understand how they work and what challenges they’re dealing with, the better chance you’ll have at successfully collaborating with them.

• Set the tone. Healthy relationships between leaders of teams can significantly influence how teams collaborate. Teams heads could initiate periodic meetings with your counterparts to understand their progress and challenges while helping each other brainstorm ideas and problem-solve.
• Get involved in other teams’ processes. We can foster collaboration between departments by scheduling formal team check-ins, interdepartmental reviews, and encouraging informal “touch base” among team members.

• Foster mutual understanding between departments through shared vision and goals.
• Encourage teams to “walk a day in the other’s shoes” and see the challenges of other departments from a different perspective.
• Bring workers from different teams or workplaces together to work on initiatives.
• It’s natural for people to have their own priorities or interests. Identify everybody’s priorities and agendas upfront to find a common denominator that will move the inter-team projects forward.
• Teams execute goals more efficiently when the beliefs that influence their choices are aligned. In the absence of shared values and goals, organisations suffer inefficiencies, lack of focus and ultimately, strategic failure. These values and goals need to be well communicated across the organisation.

• Be considerate and clear on inter-team timelines.
• Flag early when changes or delays occur that impact others.
• Practice active listening - or even better empathetic listening. Recognise the emotions that are embodied in what people are saying. Get into the habit of checking in with both the meaning and the feelings expressed in conversations. This is particularly important when different teams come at things from different angles.
• Use appropriate formats for different messages. When the need to communicate some information arises, think carefully about your format to share it. Some communications may work best as text messages, while others are more suitable for an email or phone call. Particularly important or sensitive information may also require a meeting to allow for questions and discussion to clear any confusion and ensure everyone is on the same page.

• Communicate a holistic view. It can be challenging for team members to feel committed to a project and motivated to collaborate with other departments if they don’t have the visibility or the understanding of how they impact the big picture. Give your team a holistic view of the project and a common goal. Encourage information sharing framed around shared objectives.
• Facilitate consistent communications. The increasingly fast pace of the workplace environment means everyone involved in a project needs to have the most up-to-date information at all times.
• Developments in technology have made it easier for teams to work together such that distance is no longer an issue when it comes to collaboration. Practical tools for collaboration come in many forms, such as file sharing, video conferencing or enterprise chat tools.
• Oversee team agreements as to when and how to use these tools, single points of contact between teams for key messages and appropriate timing of communications.
• Encourage active listening. Part of the challenge in facilitating effective workplace communication is balancing discussions among team members. This can be particularly difficult when dealing with different cultures, personalities, and challenging topics. Helping employees, especially managers, develop their active listening skills can help everyone feel heard and more involved.

• Use a common language. Jargon and department-specific language can alienate those in other teams. Confusion arises when team members don’t have a common understanding of terminologies used in interdepartmental communications.
• To improve cross-functional communications, develop a common language shared during new members’ onboarding process.
• Have systems and processes where employees can reference a project’s schedule and tasks to understand how their contributions affect the group. If deadlines are missed, or someone isn’t pulling their weight, it can be addressed quickly.
• Keeping the hierarchy of an organisation to a minimum prevents the information from being distorted as it is passed on (think of the game “Telephone” you played when you were a kid), as well as increasing the time and money involved with more “down-the-chain” communication.
• Employees and teams work best when they are most knowledgeable. Creating a company database of all stakeholder knowledge accessible to each team member is essential to keep everyone on the same page. Managers will have more time to focus on other issues instead of answering questions that could be answered by referring to a database of shared knowledge.
• Build a listening culture. Anchor skilled listening in your values. Helping employees, especially managers, develop their active listening skills can help everyone feel heard and more involved.