Importance of effective collaboration for team productivity

A collaborative team is much more effective than a hierarchical team. In a hierarchical team, there is a leader or captain who guides the entire team, like in a cricket or baseball game. The leader takes important decisions and each team member has a distinct role to play. Whereas in a collaborative team, there are no leaders and the groups are self-managed with everyone sharing the responsibilities equally. We can say a hierarchical team is a leader with a team and a collaborative team is a team without a leader.

There needs to be a high degree of competence and trust in a collaborative team as there is no leader to keep everyone in line. Consequently, a collaborative team functions as a matured form of a team. When organizations have more ‘individuals’ who are keen to play their own roles and responsibilities, collaboration fails and a leader is needed to manage the team.

When organizations learn to collaborate effectively, it results in:

1. Engaged employees: Failing to collaborate effectively results in disengagement, which negatively impacts the companies’ bottom-line. On the other hand, improving collaboration and increasing employee engagement results in higher profitability. Highly engaged workers are 87% less likely to quit than their bored counterparts.

• Investing 10% more into employee engagement efforts could easily increase company profits by $2,400 per employee per year.
• Engaged workers are 38% more likely to have above average productivity.
• Companies with engaged employees outperform competitors with disengaged workers by up to 202% and enjoy 2.5X more revenue growth.

1. Attract talent: Collaboration plays a key role in attracting the best talent. Millennials are looking forward to work in an environment where they can collaborate freely with the senior management. According to research on millennials in the workplace, conducted by PwC, millennials relish the opportunity to engage, interact and learn from senior management. Online collaboration removes city, region, country constraints and gives access for the employers to a huge talent pool.
2. Increased productivity: When employees learn to collaborate effectively, it reduces project timelines, reduces time-to-market and increases the ROI significantly. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, implementing collaborative processes and networking tools improved productivity by 20–30% in global software development teams.
3. Employee retention: According to the Work Institute, an estimated 41 million people voluntarily quit their jobs every year. By 2020, that number will jump to 47 million, or roughly 1 in 3 workers. This clearly shows that the millennial workforce will not hesitate to quit their job if they feel that the company is not a right fit for them. The best way to deal with this issue is to improve the employee engagement through collaboration.
4. Work-life balance: Younger generation have started demanding flexibility in their workplace and organizations that fail to provide telecommuting will not be successful in attracting the best talent. Millennial workforce demand flexible workplace and organizations are responding to the situation by investing in online collaboration tools. According to a flexjobs survey, telecommuting is increasing steadily with 103% growth rate over the last 10 years or so. Happier employees who are both physically and mentally fit perform better than their counterparts who lead a stressful life.
5. Social tools for collaboration: Millennial employees believe in integrating social media with the workplace. A study by Cisco reveals that 56% of millennials won’t work at a company if they were not provided access to social media. Apart from just online tools, 49% of millennials are already using social tools for collaboration and a study shows that 40% of millennials would even pay out of their pockets for social collaboration tools to improve productivity.

For the modern organizations, collaboration is deemed so important that up to 40% of the employees have expressed their willingness to pay for their own tools to make their jobs easier. A modern collaboration tool like Clariti can improve your productivity and efficiency — and therefore boost your bottom line.