Lists of the most innovative companies often include Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla. Although innovation is often seen as breakthrough technologies and products that change the world while transforming industries, in reality, innovation is often far more conventional. Innovations in processes and products that deliver incremental value and continuous improvement are far commonplace.
Regardless of the source or degree, innovation as corporate culture is seen as critical to survival in business today. Workplace collaboration is the heart of innovation for most organizations. The most collaborative organizations are those that enable a network of internal and external communication, cross-pollination of skills and experiences between employees, customers, departments, business units, and initiatives that engage cross-functional team participation. Effective collaboration provides more chances for innovation to emerge.
Share vision, objectives and targets
Good team teamwork starts with a larger purpose. Provide a platform that allows visibility to goals and objectives which also ties individual and team success to larger organizational goals. Allow the team to contribute to tasks needed to accomplish the organization’s larger vision. Ensure expectations and capabilities are aligned with business processes and collaboration tool capabilities. Provide visible measurable metrics that are data-driven and viewable within the collaboration space.
Provide space for an authentic connection
Idea generation requires team members to feel engaged, collaborative and heard. So, you need to make sure that you provide digital space for teams to communicate, document, measure results, and give and get feedback. Highly collaborative employees are 17% more likely to feel that their new ideas are valued and are encouraged to submit more.
Make good collaboration tool-related decisions
While there are oceans of collaboration tools in the market today, most significantly miss the mark when it comes to delivering business value. 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures. Selecting the right collaboration tool is crucial to creating a broader culture of innovation. 46% of those with effective tools for collaborating saw their organization as transparent as compared to 22% who do not. The right tool provides the foundation for innovation. Tools should be comprehensive, focused on video, digital communication, data organization, project management, and business process control; while ensuring capabilities existing to generate, document, record, and preserve ideas, decisions, and results.
Provide feedback and take action on collaboration
Deploy collaboration tools that record and measure idea generation providing an opportunity to reward individuals and teams where necessary. Ensure ideas that turn into innovation are recorded and preserved in a useful data format for future analysis and ideas that do not move forward are preserved for post-mortem. This is crucial in encouraging future collaborations, that teams get feedback, measurement, and are rewarded for working together.
Consider collaboration as a workflow
Digital collaboration should take that same precedence and priority as other mission-critical workflows of any organization. To date, digital collaboration tools have been regarded as an add-on system or a bundle purchase, while the vast majority of other systems are deployed to support, modernize, or automate a specific workflow. Effective collaboration requires the same analysis, structure, and continuous improvement rigor applied to other critical workflows.
Learn how Copy5 can improve your collaboration so that your organization stays on top of innovation.
