Top tips for creating a collaborative work environment. A Beacon Strategies Q&A
As a team of consultants working with many organisations at once who are spread across many locations, Beacon Strategies values collaboration as a key part of ‘the way we work’. Collaboration makes it easy for our client’s to work with us, align with our clients values, utilise the expertise of a wide range of stakeholders and leverage off our team’s individual strengths and preferences.
Not only are we often finding that collaboration is a key recommendation to our client partners in the projects that we deliver, but it’s also something that we continue to explore how we can better collaborate and create a more transparent, supportive and effective work environment.
We asked the team here a few questions that came to mind around the topic of collaboration.
Collaboration is a key part of ‘the way we work’ and often a key recommendation to our client partners in project we deliver
Question 1: What does it actually mean to ‘collaborate’ in a work environment?
Collaboration in the workplace is the process where ideas and solutions can be explored collectively, enabling teams and organisations to be informed by a diverse range of perspectives. Collaboration enables colleagues to develop trusted working relationships, encourage buy-in and motivation of various parties and share ownership and accountability for the outcome and product of ‘the work’.
Question 2: What is the first step to creating a collaborative environment?
Identifying the strengths of the team as individuals and as a whole. This isn’t always easy or quick — and it can take a level of trust and safety for people to arrive at a collaborative environment with an open mind and focus on a shared goal. Spending time to understand what each member of the team (a formal or informal team) is capable and confident with and what their preferences for working together are (e.g. giving and receiving feedback, communication styles) helps to create the right conditions for effective collaboration to happen. Many organisations make the mistake of jumping straight to the tool/platform or process that they are going to use to force collaboration to happen, but aren’t guided by the things that matter to the people collaborating, so they often find these tools don’t deliver what they promise.
Question 3: What are some collaborative ways of working?
With many teams now working remotely and across various workgroups, disciplines and even organisations, using technology to enable collaboration to happen is easier than ever before. During 2020, many organisations have learnt that collaboration does not always occur in person or even in the same building. Collaboration doesn’t even have to happen at the same time - what we call ‘asynchronous’ collaboration, which is preferred by many people as it allows time for preparation, reflection and juggling competing priorities. Some of the collaboration tools that we’ve found effective within our team and when working alongside our client partners here include:
Monday.com — a work ‘operating system’ where we can plan, manage and review all of the projects and activities that happen in our organisation
Slack — a channel-based communication platform that defaults to transparency where all members of an organisation can find and use the information they need, rather than keeping important information locked up in emails
Google Drive — using Google’s suite of cloud-based tools allows our team and our clients to work in public and collaborate on the same products together, helping to prevent issues with version control and restricted access.
Mural — a whiteboarding platform that allows people to collaborate and organise ideas visually.
As mentioned before, it’s important to ‘go slow’ when starting off with using any new collaborative process, to ensure people understand why it’s important, what is expected of them and others, and how they can iterate the process.
We’ve also found that collaboration works best when people hold existing relationships — when people already know and trust each other, it’s more natural working together in a remote environment.
Question 4: What is an example of a successful collaboration approach?
In many of our service design projects we apply a co-design process. While co-design is a bit of a buzzword and can mean different things to different people, we see it as a collaborative, cooperative and community-centred approach to inform programs, services or organisations more broadly. Co-design is a way that enables us to collaborate with not just our clients, but also their stakeholders and customers.
One example of this is the outpatients co-design project where we collaborated with Brisbane North Primary Health Network and Metro North Hospital and Health Services to co-design new and sustainable models of care. We collaborated with various groups, including separate working group and steering group mechanisms for the project, as well as collaborating with general practitioners (GPs), health consumer and carer representatives, and staff from Metro North specialist outpatient services. We used a range of collaboration methods including regular meetings, online focus groups, individual interviews, online surveys and recorded webinars.
We were able to present recommendations that responded to the pain points and potential solutions identified through our work with various stakeholders (thanks to co-design).
How to become more collaborative in your work environment
Through collaboration with colleagues, here’s a few steps you can take to become more collaborative in your work environment:
Emphasise and/or reinforce from leaders that collaboration is important
Spend time understanding the strengths of different individuals and what they bring to the team/group as a whole
Identify preferences for working together and use these to create shared expectations for what good looks like
Learn from previous experiences about what works
Identify the few tools and platforms that will work best for your situation
Do you have any tips on creating a collaborative working environment? We are always keen to learn and implement innovative strategies to improve our way of working so we would love to know! Leave a comment over on our socials or email us at info@beaconstrategies.net.