In business, cooperation is everything. Without colleagues working well together to overcome challenges, solve problems, and deliver the kind of high-quality work that drives success, then your business can flounder in a vast sea of competitors. Collaboration amongst your workforce won’t necessarily come naturally, and you need to work at creating the environment and conditions for cooperation to grow. There are different ways you can boost cooperation in your business, and in this article, we’ll look at a few of them.
Making your company culture all about collaborative relationships
Effective cooperation starts at the top with business leaders and filters down from there. If everybody in management works together as a team, then, by example, you will be sending strong signals throughout the business that this is the way things are done. If your team can see objectives are met by effective cooperation, then they will be encouraged to work together to achieve their goals.
Forge a business culture in which the exchange of ideas and positive, constructive feedback is encouraged and not suppressed. You could even incorporate your ethos of cooperation into your company mission statement to make the intention abundantly clear.
Effective cooperation needs cooperative tools
If you put the right resources in place to support a cooperative approach to work, then a more collaborative outcome can be achieved. Starting with the physical environment, you should ensure that the workplace is comfortable and amenable to collaborative work; open-plan offices, usable meeting spaces, and presentation rooms could all help. If your team is not physically together all the time, then you must ensure that the right conferencing and networking software exists on everybody’s devices to provide constant, cooperative communication is possible.
There are plenty of collaborative online portals you can deploy that can support everything from document syncing, storing and sharing, workflow administration, and even allow you to undertake employee engagement surveys, such as inpulse.com, for example. The more you understand your employees, the more targeted your cooperation boosting activities will be.
Maintain a consistent approach to skills development
Don’t skimp on collaborative skills training. There is a wide variety of team bonding, and cooperation focused courses available that can be delivered in-house, externally, or even online. The important thing is ensuring that everybody has access to the learning facilities they need to keep their collaborative skills up to date.
Prioritize conflict resolution
Festering animosity amongst team members will significantly inhibit cooperative behavior, so it’s imperative to have a solid conflict resolution process in place that everyone is familiar with, and that is engaged immediately upon any arising issues. When employees feel that they can confidently resolve issues, have their grievances heard, and know that they can become involved with the resolution process and any associated outcomes, they will be able to return to a collaborative state far quicker.
Leading by example, putting the right tools and resources in place, maintaining development channels, and quickly resolving any conflict can go a long way towards improving employee cooperation in your business.
