How to Improve Collaboration in Your Southaven, MS Business

Innovation starts at the ground level — with people coming together, sharing ideas, and creating something bigger than themselves. But to achieve true collaboration within a company, you need to approach it from all angles, including the proper use of collaboration tools and technologies and an open communication culture that encourages idea sharing, feedback, and conversations between teams. The Southaven Chamber of Commerce presents some steps you can take to help improve collaboration in your company.

Achieve Cross-Team Collaboration

Try creating opportunities for teams to work together, such as combining new ideas, conducting brainstorming sessions between departments, or rotating employees across departments. Ultimately, increasing cross-team collaboration drives new ideas and helps cultivate innovation among your coworkers.

The Right Tools and Platforms

It can be difficult for team members in a large organization to stay on top of tasks, projects, and responsibilities. One of your best options is software-as-a-service or cloud-based applications that integrate directly with existing business tools and are intuitive enough for non-technical users. For example, if your team uses Slack, you can integrate Monday.com to help members organize their work more efficiently. They can assign tasks to individuals, run meetings, manage projects, and streamline processes to ensure everyone knows who is handling what and when.

Build an Innovative Culture

Creating a culture of openness and innovation can lead to more effective products, more engaged employees, and better business performance, according to Engagedly. It all starts with your top leadership. If you, as the CEO, are open to new ideas from anyone in your company, your senior team will be also. From there, it’s about making it easy for people throughout your organization to contribute innovative ideas.

Streamline Document Flow

There is nothing more frustrating than missing an important document within a barrage of work emails. Instead of having your employees searching through their inboxes and piecing together edits on important documents, encourage document to PDF conversion. While it may be easier to work with documents in MS Word, a PDF preserves formatting and allows for easy commenting from various team members. You can automatically convert your doc to PDF to send information back and forth, and members can convert back to Word for edits.

Reward Employees

Don’t over-complicate matters. If you want to foster an environment of collaboration, there are a few simple ways to do it. Write thank you notes, and have employees do so as well. Offer incentives for good teamwork, and award prizes for open-communication efforts. Everyone likes to feel appreciated — and if your business isn't giving its workers that sense of appreciation, it might be time for a reevaluation.

Encourage Employee Feedback

Encourage and value employee feedback. Sapling encourages businesses to create channels of communication where employees can share their ideas, offer solutions, and suggest improvements. Always give employees a chance to speak their minds — your business will be much better for it. Don’t be afraid to solicit feedback in nontraditional ways. Consider holding a quarterly brainstorming competition where winners are invited on an all-expenses-paid team-building retreat in New York City, or create an anonymous suggestion box where employees can submit suggestions anonymously.

Use Social Media

Make a social media page, and invite everyone to participate. Use social media to share photographs, work stories, and other content to help increase camaraderie and teamwork. If you want to share photos on social media, you can resize images online to optimize the size of your photos instantaneously. You can effortlessly submit your resized photographs to your social networking pages once resized.

Effective Collaboration Strategies

These collaboration strategies can lead to more effective meetings, increased project success rates, and a better employee experience. Look for digital tools like PDF converters and team organizers to help keep everyone on the same page and communicate effectively, and don’t forget to keep morale high. 

Access even more great resources to help your business grow and thrive in our community by joining the Southaven Chamber of Commerce.