By John Rampton, the founder of Calendar, a company helping your calendar be much more productive.
Productivity. You know it’s higher when team members work collaboratively. They pull at the same time, in the same direction, like a well-trained crew. They keep the boat moving forward, gliding at a smooth and quick clip rather than listing one way or the other.
But you can’t just pop a few people into the boat at random. Each seat must be filled by the right individual with the right strengths and skills. It’s the combining of parts into a whole that gives you great results. That’s collaboration, and productivity needs it to thrive.
As a leader, you know it’s not always easy to get your team members working in harmony. But when productivity is on the line, it’s your job to make it happen. Based on my own experience, here are four collaboration hacks you can use to get your team in sync.
1. Allow workplace flexibility.
The remote versus in-office versus hybrid debate rages on as companies struggle to figure out what works best for them and their employees. Every workplace arrangement has advantages and disadvantages, and much of it depends on the types of projects your team works on. The only sure thing is that employees have tested their options and formed decided preferences of their own.
By and large, teams continued to be productive while working from home during the pandemic. Forcing everyone back to the office full-time seems to be more about a leadership power dynamic than a practical one, as it’s hard to argue that a mandated commute is the most productive use of your team members’ time. You’ll need to have some really compelling reasons to return to a fully in-office arrangement rather than allowing your team at least some workplace flexibility.
The infrastructure that allows teams to collaborate from more than one location at any given time is already in place. I believe that angering—or at least annoying—employees by frog-marching them back to the office is a productivity bust. Give them a choice of where to best flex their collaborative muscles.
2. Get them on the same schedule.
Of course, getting your team on the same schedule doesn’t mean everyone does the same thing simultaneously. It means setting them all up on a shared calendar. (Full disclosure: My company offers this service, as do others.)
Form a group using your calendar software, and give everyone access. When a team member needs to reach out to a co-worker to do some brainstorming or hash out a project requirement, they will instantly know when that person does and doesn’t have availability. Then they can set up a mutually workable meeting time with a click of the mouse.
Shared calendars can save a lot of time otherwise spent going back and forth, trying to synchronize schedules. And you know what that means: Less time spent making arrangements and more time working on the projects at hand.
3. Promote the use of collaborative tech tools.
No matter where your team members work from at any given moment, they should never lose touch with one another. Fortunately, there is an abundance of tech tools they can use to collaborate in real time, any time. You simply need to make sure they have the ones they need and that everyone knows how to use them to their best advantage.
This goes beyond Zoom or whatever video-conferencing and screen-sharing platform you have. Consider also providing an intuitive project management platform, a user-friendly digital whiteboard and a versatile team chat app. And to make collaborative presentations easier to produce, consider a mind-mapping app. AI-powered technology is making such tools more responsive than ever. The more work these tech aids do to facilitate collaboration, the more time your team can spend on delivering results.
4. Optimize your processes.
Processes are necessary in business, but they can get in the way of actually getting business done. Inconsistencies, operational dysfunction, resource inefficiencies and repetitive problems can gut productivity. Taking the time to optimize your processes can be an exercise in collaboration itself.
When a process continually breaks down, charge your team with figuring out how to improve it. Say a senior manager needs to approve certain project deliverables before they can be handed off to the next person in the process. Maybe the emails requesting these approvals are getting buried in the manager’s inbox. In that case, incorporating the approval step into an automated workflow with notifications could solve the problem. Or perhaps there needs to be more than one designated approver.
Whatever the case, invite those most affected by flawed processes to collaborate on ways to optimize them. Not only are you bringing fresh perspectives to old problems, but you’re also opening the door to using new technologies to solve them. By getting faulty processes out of the way, you enable your team to get back to doing their core jobs.
Help your crew collaborate.
Employee work ethics, priorities, commitments and generations are shifting. So is technology, affecting how teams work. But amid all this change, a company’s need for team productivity remains immutable, as does the link between collaboration and productivity.
Instead of paddling in circles, embrace some new ways to make team collaboration easier and stronger than ever. If you do, that constant need for productivity may just take care of itself.
