Unleashing the Business Power of Collaboration
Collaboration in the workplace - which we define as two or more people working together, either face to face or virtually, toward a common business goal - presents both opportunities and challenges to an organization. The collaborative energy, skills, and knowledge of workers can lead to more and better ideas, products, and services; faster cycle or development times; faster response to business challenges or changes in the competitive landscape; and reduced costs.
The results of initiatives to improve collaboration have been mixed because the challenges have not been met. Companies still do not know how to identify when and where in the organization collaboration is most important, how to get collaborative activities started, how to sustain them, and how to measure and communicate their business value.
Successful collaboration arises from business strategy, aligns with business outcomes, and is supported by organizational structures and technology. Like any other process, it requires thought, preparation, support, energy, and communication. Handing someone a hammer does not make him or her a carpenter; giving people collaboration tools and technologies without showing them how to work together, how to use the tools, how to define success, and how to get results does not make them collaborators.
Interventions to improve collaboration should be done for specific work groups with specific collaboration objectives. Getting this design for collaboration right involves:
- Setting the business objectives, with an eye toward interdependence of associated activities, difficulty of coordination, and key players and their locations.
- Within each objective, identifying the business processes that will most benefit from improved collaboration, and determining the nature and extent of the need and opportunity. Then breaking each process down into its component activities, with an eye toward the skills and behaviors needed to perform each activity successfully.
- Aligning the "three C's" of collaboration to enable each process and its activities: Components (the elements of the work process and how they interrelate), Construct (the infrastructure, including information technology systems and physical facilities), Capacity (the skills and beliefs of the people involved).
This Re.sults report defines collaboration in the workplace, explores the reasons why traditional collaboration strategies failed, and examines the current requirements for success. It discusses the barriers and enablers of collaboration and explains what it takes to develop an effective collaboration strategy. It also provides a four-step process for leveraging collaboration for business results, including a framework and case studies companies can use to assess specific initiatives involving collaboration.