Boost Innovation Through Shared Resources
In a recent blog post , Clear Company affirms that Millennials ( who will soon be the largest segment of the workforce ) have fully embraced the interplay of teamwork and technology — with nearly half supporting the use of social tools for workplace collaboration .
** 7 WORKPLACE COLLABORATION STATISTICS THAT WILL HAVE YOU KNOCKING DOWN CUBICLES BY SYLVIE WOOLF
WANTED
Leaders Who Can Collaborate With Confidence
With significant shifts in the workplace and in the nature of leadership , the future of business is collaborative . Organizations , employees and even customers — increasingly interlinked and interactive — will partner through shared resources , structures , relationships and accountability to drive common goals forward . Astute leaders can foster a creative and cohesive collaborative work environment that leads to success by taking proactive steps :
Develop a system that helps to inspire collaboration . While collaboration can accelerate innovative R & D , it won ’ t do so without systems for aggregating and curating ideas and data — and keeping brainstorms on track .
Employees innovate more practically and directly against company goals when they ’ re reminded of them . Embrace the new coaching style of leadership by developing SMART ( specific , measureable , attainable , relevant , time-bound ) innovation goals and setting priorities together , establishing automated calendar reminders , regularly discussing progress , and reviewing how their creativity is directly linked to company success .
Collaborative processes are likely to occur at much faster speeds than what your company is comfortable with . Dealing with smaller integrative teams necessitates leaders who will keep a tight pulse on what ’ s working and what ’ s not — and who can immediately jump in and shift the direction of a project if need be .
Consider shifting your management structure to one built upon lateral relationships , which are generally more personable and transparent than hierarchical systems . Interact with and become intimately aware of how innovation teams are functioning so that you can recognize individual contributions , not just the larger group ’ s role in a collaborative effort . Because team members need to see their contributions apply to both short- and longterm goals , it ’ s always good to connect the dots between individual accomplishments and their larger impact on the company . By doing so , it will also challenge and inspire other employees to innovate and collaborate .
COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS
Boost Innovation Through Shared Resources
> A collaborative work system significantly affects how information is generated , shared , and monetized within a company or between enterprises . But transforming a more traditional company into a flexible , collaborative one requires significant effort , as it usually must integrate traditionally isolated functions . For this reason , many enterprises beta-test collaborative models , one R & D project at a time , in order to control reorganization costs and weigh the advantages provided by different models . The primary goal is to ensure that knowledge , data , and ideas that were once contained in a function become accessible to innovation teams . With a lateral , flexible organizational design , these teams can quickly support one another during the R & D process and accelerate launches of products and services . However , while dynamic cross-functional teams enable constant casual communication , it ’ s also important to build formal checkpoints into the project schedule so that issues , solutions and new ideas birthed by the team are formally logged in . In a collaborative workforce model , such ideas and benchmark information at large are incessantly reworked and applied to different projects . By formally cataloging those , other teams in the organization can more easily reference and borrow from them , increasing productivity and driving innovation while keeping overhead low through best practices .
CONNECT CULTURE WINTER 2016 // SNB . COM | 7