Collaboration is essential for successful companies since it helps drive up productivity levels and provides employees with a sense of belonging to a valuable, caring business organization. Working in a collaborative way means your business can benefit from having access to a large group of individuals who have a wide range of different talents and skills.
Everyone must do their bit and pull their weight for a modern business to run smoothly and successfully. We’ve come up with this piece on how to create a positive company culture of collaboration for modern business owners. Carry on reading to find out more.
1. Embrace Office Designs That Facilitate Employee Collaboration
Having an office space broken up by walls and chunky office screens and partitions doesn’t lend itself well to collaboration in the office space. Colleagues tasked with working together on work projects need to be able to physically get to each other with as much ease as possible. Why not try making your office space open plan, so collaboration is made simpler? But the office floor isn’t the only office space where employees can collaborate.
Employees may also collaborate in conference rooms or breakout spaces using tablets, laptops, projector screens, or an old-fashioned whiteboard to bounce their exciting ideas off one another. To find out more about conference room design ideas for modern office spaces, check out this article from Branch Furniture, a provider of top-quality office furniture that isn’t too expensive.
Ergonomic chairs can help promote productivity and good health in offices. They support the back, head, neck, and shoulders. Plus, these chairs have adjustable features allowing users to customize their chairs to fit their needs. This is to help reduce stress and prevent injuries.
For your office, you can check high-quality ergonomic chairs online, such as Freedman’s Office Furniture.
2. Interact With Remote Staff Using Business Communication Platforms
Today, many businesses have at least a few staff members who work remotely from home and don’t go into the office. In this case, you must communicate and collaborate with remote workers over business communication platforms. These platforms enable you to interact with remote staff via videoconference calls, instant messages, and audio. In an ideal world where everyone has a perfect internet connection, communication between remote and on-site employees should work seamlessly.
However, technical issues do occur from time to time, people have to contend with their internet going down, and sometimes messages can take longer to deliver. In order to run a business organization that promotes a positive company culture of collaboration, you must include remote staff as much as possible. Excluding remote team member is no good for your business’s overall morale, and you should try and be as inclusive as possible. Embrace modern technology as an innovation that can help colleagues in your company collaborate better with one another.
3. Organize Fun Social Events That Require Teamwork
Work social events are fun occasions. Try and promote collaboration and teamwork by thinking of activities your employees can work on together. For instance, they could go paintballing, try to complete an escape room, or go on an adventure weekend and do things such as abseiling and canoeing, where collaboration is vital. Work social events are also an excellent, casual opportunity for your employees to get to know each other better in a more relaxed setting outside the workplace.
Do you have a remote business? Virtual happy hours can help everyone relax and socialize with your team after work. You can use a video conferencing platform to connect with everyone and even order food or drinks to make the social event feel like a real party.
Many virtual team-building activities, like escape rooms, scavenger hunts, and trivia games, are available. These activities can help improve your team’s communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.
Regardless of the type of social event you choose, make sure that it’s something that your team members will enjoy. Planning a fun and engaging event can help build a more cohesive team.
4. Provide Staff With Positive Reinforcement And Praise
Part of fostering a thriving culture of collaboration and teamwork also involves letting employees know when they’ve done something good that’s helped the company and praising them for their efforts. In addition, you may wish to provide employees with extra rewards for excellent performance at work, such as financial bonuses at the end of the month or tokens for popular stores.
The specific awards will vary depending on the company’s culture and values. Choosing awards that are meaningful to employees and can motivate them to continue to do their best work is important. For instance, the ‘Employee of the Month’ is given to an employee who has consistently exceeded expectations.
The ‘Years of Service Award’ is given to an employee who has reached a significant milestone in their tenure with the company. On the other hand, a ‘Leadership Award’ is given to an employee with outstanding leadership skills. Innovation Award is also a great recognition for an employee who has come up with a new and innovative idea that has benefited the company.
5. Modern Business Owners should Reach Out And Work With Organizations In The Local Area
Collaborating with local businesses is always a good look. It shows your business isn’t just a heartless profit-making machine but a part of the community that cares deeply about the local area and its residents. You may decide to reach out and collaborate with local charities as well as businesses.
Offer local charities support in the form of voluntary work, partnerships, promoting their charitable organization with your followers across your social media channels, and fundraising to enable them to carry on doing the work they do and ensure their survival. You want customers and the public to view your business as a valuable staple of the local community, and collaborating with local organizations will help you achieve this.
6. Collaborate With Social Media Influencers To Advertise Your Products And Services Online
The nature of advertising is now very different from how it used to be. Advertisements are primarily done in the form of digital marketing campaigns in 2022, whereas they used to be all about billboards, TV commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, etc. Today, social media advertisements, blog posts, online banners, promotional emails, video campaigns posted on websites, and search engine optimization are all examples of common digital marketing practices. It’s in your business’s interests to do your best to collaborate and team up with the modern-day ‘megastars,’ which are social media influencers.
These influencers often have millions of followers across their social media accounts, and ironically, they can be very ‘influential’ and effective at encouraging people to buy your products and services. If you manage to successfully collaborate with social media influencers and get them to endorse your products on platforms online, you’d be surprised at the extent of the positive impact it could have on your sales figures. Examples of significant U.S social media influencers include Logan Paul, Jake Paul, Emma Chamberlain, MrBeast, Casey Neistat, and many more.
7. Encourage Employees To Share Their Ideas With Colleagues
Collaboration works well when we can all learn new things from listening and communicating together. There’s always a lot you can learn from other people. Perhaps one of your colleagues is able to put forward fantastic proposals in a specialist area that you know less about, and you can listen and absorb their specialist knowledge and learn from what they have to say.
Your business should actively encourage colleagues to share their ideas with colleagues. Significant progress can be made when great minds collaborate and exchange their unique viewpoints and differing opinions. Try and make your employees understand that one of the main goals of workplace collaboration is to continually learn and pick up on new things every working day.
8. Be Open To Forming Partnerships With Overseas Parties
Try and keep an open mind about collaborating with clients, vendors, investors, suppliers, and so on who are located abroad. You will find that sometimes things can work out a little cheaper when you buy items from lesser-known suppliers abroad, instead of getting all your supplies in the U.S.
In order to form overseas partnerships and communicate properly with businesspeople from across the world, it may be a good idea for you to employ staff who are able to speak several different languages fluently. You could decide to make having an aptitude for foreign languages a requirement for some of the job roles in your company that you advertise.
Given the globalized nature of business in 2022 and how interconnected we all are now, collaborating on an international scale is more vitally important than ever. In addition, if you’re able to sell to customers based across the entire world, your organization has the potential to grow considerably and make much larger profits than if it only sold products and services nationally.
These are a few pointers on how modern business owners can help create a positive company culture of collaboration. Make sure you keep your staff well-focused and help them develop a keen desire to learn through working on collaborative projects together regularly.
