Working Together: Best Practices

It sounds good, but it isn’t easy. It takes a combination of technology and technique to really be an effective, collaborative worker.

Corporate leaders we interviewed said that their companies offered very little training in collaboration but they try to hire individuals who demonstrate an ability to work well with others. “The ability to build and foster relationships is a trait that we look for in new hires,” explains a senior marketing executive at a national hospitality company.

“Collaborative skills are in short supply in most new hires,” says consultant Peter Davidson. “It’s a fundamental skill going all the way back to learning to share as toddlers.” But companies seem ill-prepared to continue developing that skill in the workplace short of providing new technologies that are supposed to foster collaboration.

“I’m a sort-of new hire myself,” claims Jinal Shah a recent college graduate, new employee and blogger living in the Northeastern US. “However I wasn’t spoon-fed. I was just thrown in and I learned my way quickly.”

While some companies provide mentoring or buddy programs for new hires, others leave assimilation into the corporate culture up to the new hire. The result can be a stifling of creativity and intimidation when it comes to collaboration. An executive currently working inside one of the top three auto companies responded to our inquiry on this matter with the following insights:

“There is an awareness that new hires will not be “accepted” by the old guard, but 110% of the burden is placed upon the new hire and no attention is placed upon changing the worst aspects of the old culture.”

So, as tough as it is to bring in new employees with strong collaborative talents, how do the best companies go about leveraging the skills and abilities of their human resource? There seem to be some common themes in the businesses we interviewed:

1) Knowledge and information was transferred from text-based repositories to more interactive medias (i.e. a wiki or some other interactive database structure) that provided both access to the information and the ability to add/modify content on the fly;

2) The transformation to a project management scheduling tool that was both web-based and interactive, allowing workers to set their own production schedules, share information, etc.;

3) Clear and objective direction from managers tasked with keeping “the big picture” in full view and instructed not to worry about the small stuff;

4) Active engagement by management when things went astray – including the disciplining of team members who could not stay on task or get jobs done on time – in essence a higher standard of accountability;

5) The development of trust between all members of the collaborative team and between the teams and management, thereby avoiding devious politics and micro-management;

6) Benchmarking and measurement of results to use for constructive feedback.

Interestingly enough, most of the innovations required to create a collaborative workplace involved changes in behavior (by both employees and management) and were not, necessarily technology-reliant.

Maybe there’s a greater lesson to learn here?

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