Organizations are well aware of the dangers of siloed departments and tunnel vision. Strong collaboration drives more effective business outcomes. Here are 10 ways that strong collaboration can help improve performance.
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“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team” — Reid Hoffman

1. Promotes knowledge sharing

Exchanging information, insights and valuable understanding between individuals, teams and organizations is essential to achieving success. It can both boost someone’s understanding on a topic and turn an archive of findings, processes and learnings into accessible knowledge for others.

2. Breaks down barriers

Having the opportunity to meet and connect with the relevant stakeholders sheds light on what knowledge and access is both available and necessary for success. This stops “tunnel vision”early on in the process and encourages a holistic view of the problem and potential solution.

3. Increases innovation

Giving people from different industries, backgrounds and level of seniority a seat at the table creates a more diverse dialogue around the problem. This, in turn, widens the pool of diverse potential solutions and increases innovation.

4. Builds consensus

Understanding others’ viewpoints can improve our appreciation for the role they play in achieving our shared goals. Deepening our shared alignment on the company vision, can also help to reach an agreement faster.

5. Sparks tolerance and understanding

Collaboration forces us to intentionally widen our window of tolerance, which builds our compassion and understanding of others. This leads to more productive meetings, improved well-being and better performance.

6. Speeds up time to market

Boosted innovation, better communication and a more effective use of employee resources allows projects to be divided up more effectively, decreasing time to market.

7. Makes processes more efficient

Collaboration can help us avoid duplicated activities, fix errors that could have been avoided and patch up costly gaps. The opportunity to redefine our workflow and transform processes can bolster performance and revenue.

8. Boost employee engagement

According to a Stanford study, “Participants in the research who were primed to act collaboratively stuck at their task 64% longer than their solitary peers, whilst also reporting higher engagement levels, lower fatigue levels, and a higher success rate.”

9. Improves flexibility for the organization

Being able to pivot and adapt is an essential skill in the business world. Collaboration can help employees prepare for changes in the future and embrace it as an inevitable challenge rather than a barrier to success.

10. Increases profitability.

Simply put, building a collaborative culture does justice to employees’ skills. When Google For Work and Raconteur asked what changes would have the greatest impact on their organization’s overall profitability, 56% of respondents ranked a collaboration-related measure as the #1 factor.
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About Ten Thousand Coffees

Ten Thousand Coffees is an enterprise talent development platform that enables companies to scale and measure informal development. Every month, members receive data-driven introduction that are customized to their goals, interests and role. Feedback and success stories provide your organization with impactful business insights about the success of your people-strategies.  The Future of Work is transforming organizations: informal development between colleagues is where talent mobility and culture sticks. 

Visit www.tenthousandcoffees.com to learn more about how Ten Thousand Coffees can help your team today.

For more information contact [email protected]

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