Mind Merge: Driving Collaboration Across Your Business

If you’ve gone the extra mile to recruit the brightest minds in the industry, it’s important to create a working environment that optimizes their potential as a team. Collaboration should improve performance rather than detract from it, here’s how to make that a reality.

Use the Right Tools

Whether your business is conducted in-person or remotely, it’s vital to ensure that your employees have the right tools and resources at their disposal to communicate with each other efficiently. This applies to office space as well as software. If, for example, you’d like to book a fully outfitted meeting room for a short space of time, a hosting service like Davinci can have you covered for as little as $10 per hour and with over 20,000 locales to choose from. 

Or, if you’re in need of virtual collaboration options, there are plenty of online solutions available for file sending, video chat, project sharing, and more, offered as both free and paid platforms. For the best results, spend a little time researching which tools have had the most success within your industry.

Lead the Way

Team meetings are a great opportunity to open the floor for employee input. To ensure that your staff feels comfortable pitching in, be sure to offer words of support and recognize the valuable contributions they’ve made. This will validate their efforts and encourage others to begin speaking up as well. 

It’s also important to remember that not every employee feels comfortable sharing ideas in a group setting. It may be worthwhile to implement new meeting types that accommodate their unique participation styles and allow workers to collaborate in pairs or in smaller teams. 

Implement Incentives

Incentives are a great way to motivate employees to participate in a team setting. You could, for example, encourage employees to connect on social media and share photos about their favorite aspects of working for your company (using images that have been correctly resized with a photo size editor to help maintain professional appearances) with prizes for the best posts. Exercises like these are great for increasing camaraderie and provide additional marketing benefits for your business.

Although incentives work well in motivating workers to increase their efforts, some will prove more effective than others. Consider the demographics of your staff when selecting these. Some employees may, for example, prefer working harder for a more valuable prize than easily winning something small and inconsequential. 

Establish Culture

Collaboration efforts will rarely succeed if your employees aren’t comfortable working together. Team building activities are a vital part of creating a culture of collaboration within your company. Whether you offer lunchtime yoga sessions or spend a Friday afternoon getting together for a couple of drinks, interacting outside of a work context is an important strategy for getting everyone on the same page.

It may also be worthwhile to encourage teamwork during employee induction so that new recruits are integrated early in their company tenure. Try to involve existing members of staff in the program so that new workers have an example from which to model their own behavior.

Collaboration should work to increase employee productivity and job satisfaction. By creating the right opportunities for your staff to work together, you can build a cohesive working environment that will ultimately lead to a lower staff turnover rate and higher profits for the company as a whole.

Davinci Virtual Office Solutions is an innovator in the remote working industry. We are global providers of business addresses, live chat services, and meeting spaces for virtual teams everywhere. We believe in approaching work with an open mind and finding the right solution for businesses in every niche. Find out more about our services at: www.davincivirtual.com

About Nicola Reid

Nicola Reid is an entrepreneur and small business owner. She created Business4Today to provide access to the resources members of marginalized groups need to turn their entrepreneurial dreams into reality. Through her site, she hopes to support the growing number of people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community who are taking the leap into small business ownership.