Effective collaboration within a team results in higher employee productivity. As a business owner, you should ensure that your business is both engaging and cooperative. This can only be accomplished by exercising creative instincts. Most teams that collaborate begin by optimizing each employee’s skills, inspiring cooperation, and creative buy-in from all stakeholders.

Here are four ways you can enhance the collaborative efforts of your teams;

Create a Gift Culture

One of the most important roles of business leaders is to make sure that coaching and mentoring is integrated into the daily behavior throughout the company. Although both formal and less formal mentoring processes are important, the less formal mentoring process is more likely to enhance employee productivity and collaborative behavior. Coaching also helps to create a cooperative gift culture in a business instead of having a transactional (tit-for-tat) type of culture. Meaning that mentors and team members are supportive for the sake of being supportive, rather than because they hope to get something in return.

Focus on the HR Practices

The collaboration of your teams shouldn’t only be in the hands of your executives. Your HR department is responsible for employee productivity management, rewards, promotion, and training. Having an experienced HR officer will help create a more collaborative team because they can utilize a reward system that they know is effective, which will encourage more collaborative behavior. Although some HR programs are limited, they can major in formal team performances including training in collaborative behavior and skills.

Ensuring Employees Have the Necessary Skills

Most factors that enhance employee productivity through collaboration relate mostly to the underlying habits and culture of a business. Some companies may have created a collaborative culture, but their teams lack the skills to collaborate effectively. Such teams are cooperative because they want to cooperate but don’t know how to work as a team. This is why it’s necessary for employees to have skills like being able to engage in focused conversations, appreciate others, resolve conflicts and program management. Your employee productivity will increase after training them in those areas.

Allocating Leaders who are both relationship and Task Oriented

For a long time, both senior managers and academics have been debating on the best style that can be adopted to lead employee teams. Some believe that relationship-oriented leadership is better while dealing with several employees or a complex team. This is because employee productivity will increase and they can easily share knowledge in an environment of goodwill and trust. On the other hand, others have argued that task oriented leadership is better to be able to make clear objectives, provide monitoring and feedback, and to share awareness of different tasks. In many cases, it’s necessary to utilize a combination of both styles in order to meet the needs of your team members.

It’s important to be intentional in the training of both leaders and team members in order to facilitate the teamwork and company culture necessary to be successful in today’s business world. By carefully implementing the above strategies to enhance cooperation of your teams, your company will be able to create the environment it needs to solve the challenges that will occur. If you need assistance enhancing the cooperation of your teams and creating a collaborative business culture, contact Equal Parts Consulting today.