Cultivating a Collaborative Work Environment

If your organization is looking for ways to boost productivity and encourage collaboration, begin by taking a closer look at the work environment you’re promoting. Physical workspace design is a tool that can encourage positive behaviors in employees. For example, if you’re trying to increase communication across different departments, the DESIGN+BUILD team would consider that and bring down barriers between those areas and create places to increase the chance encounters between those departments.

When employees feel comfortable in their workspace, they’re more likely to share ideas, spread knowledge, and explore new workflow possibilities. In short, encouraging collaboration makes your team greater than the sum of each working on the team.

What does that mean for your business? To start, a study from the Institute for Corporate Productivity has shown that high-performance organizations are up to 5.5 times more likely to incentivize individual, team, and leader collaboration than lower-performance organizations. In today’s workplace, your team can no longer separate collaboration from your overall business success. If you’re ready to start implementing the latest collaboration approaches, here are some strategies to get you started.

Collaboration Strategies

Keep Communication Open

When employees know what’s going on within an organization, they feel part of a larger, thriving community. Keeping pathways of communication and clarity open is a great way to encourage goodwill and group work. In addition, by understanding how employees’ actions contribute to your business’s overarching mission, you can avoid them feeling like they’re just another cog in the machine.

Being transparent in the decision-making process and clarifying a vision for the future can offer your team a sense of agency while allowing them to voice their ideas, knowing they’ll be heard. This can be as simple as quick morning meetings to keep everyone on the same page or a frequent email newsletter that invites employee input.

Focus on Individual Strengths and Successes

For a collaborative office to work, you can’t forget about the individuals making it happen. Focus on balancing individual strengths that contribute to team successes. This includes finding the right balance of personalities and skillsets. That way, your team can help each other grow while enjoying their work environment. While celebrating moments of success as a team, don’t forget to acknowledge the individual contributions behind that success.

Consider Your Collaboration Platform

With today’s collaboration tools, communication doesn’t always have to happen face to face. Streamlining collaboration with a technology tool that allows your team to communicate from anywhere is a critical way of achieving a collaborative atmosphere. Some questions, ideas, and issues are urgent enough to be discussed without interfering with normal operations. Integrating a collaboration platform that uses tools like messaging and conferencing can help your team share ideas and tackle challenges without slowing down.

The Importance of Thoughtful Design

As mentioned above, your team needs a space where they feel comfortable collaborating. Thoughtful office design is essential to achieving this goal. From striking the right balance between open office space and quiet, focus-oriented areas to creating a welcoming environment, your office design is essential if you want to increase productivity and maximize employee satisfaction.

Contact our team of experts today if you’re looking for a more concrete way to boost productivity and take advantage of more collaborative workspaces. We’ll work with your team at every stage of the process, from design to build, so that you can turn the vision for your office into a reality.