Sharing is Caring: Boosting Collaborating in Your Business

They say that two heads are better than one and in the business world this often proves to be true. Collaboration can help you turn concepts into concrete action and transform good ideas into great ones.

Of course, collaboration shouldn’t diminish individual responsibility and nor does it mean that you won’t have leaders and managers driving projects forward. Rather, it simply ensures that you get to share the challenges and rewards of your hard work, providing better results for the company as a whole.

The importance of office design

The layout of your office pays a fundamental role in creating a collaborative atmosphere. Embracing an open plan design, for example, makes it much easier to share your thoughts with your colleagues and work together. More than that, however, it creates a vibe where every desk feels approachable, rather than being shut off and isolated.

Look outside as well as in

When it comes to collaboration it is easy to focus solely on your own company, but would a project benefit from external assistance? Explore mutually beneficial partnerships with businesses based nearby that could deliver improved results. Perhaps you require a skill that you simply don’t possess internally and could leverage your own talents in order to access it from another firm. With the rise of digital tools, like video conferencing, you can even extend your working relationship to businesses that are based all over the world.

In order to gain access to external collaboration that works for your business, you’ll need to give off an air of approachability and you must also put yourself out there. Attending industry events and networking sessions will put your company in a position to meet other businesses and create long-term partnerships.

Use the right software

Software is a vital part of modern collaboration and has made sharing projects much easier than it used to be. In the past, collaborative projects meant that team members had to deal with hundreds of emails and multiple versions of the same document, all while dealing with individual work. Today, this is no longer the case.

Collaboration software, like SharePoint, lets teams create project hubs to share, edit and store files in real-time. What’s more, there are a number of agencies that have been set up to ensure you get the most from these digital tools. SharePoint consulting services let you customise your collaboration software to ensure it suits your staff and their projects.

Get to know each other better

It may seem obvious, but if you don’t know your colleagues that well, then this is going to hinder collaboration. Firstly, having strong personal relationships with your fellow members of staff lets you recognise their strengths and weaknesses more easily, meaning you can identify which colleagues would be a good fit for certain types of work.

Perhaps more importantly, getting on well with your colleagues will simply make collaborative projects run much more smoothly. Being able to talk openly about personal interests will help prevent boredom creeping in and encourage closer sharing of ideas, both of which are vital strands of effective business collaboration.