Author name: graviteams

Collaboration stands at the center of good teamwork and is key to high performance. But successful and effective collaboration means not simply more of it. In fact, if not managed properly ineffective collaboration can quickly get out of hand: in some companies, collaboration takes as much as 80% of working time[1] leaving employees and leaders with not enough time for deep concentrated work.

Team-time is a very valuable resource and should be used as such. Successful collaboration means: 1) defining what needs to be done together and 2) making the best use of this time. Both require a good understanding of the nature of work and the organizational specifics of teams, as they can differ greatly in their demands and benefits of the team-time.

So, let us think about how collaboration could be organized in different types of teams.

In today’s realm of the complex, multidimensional and interconnected business world, resilience becomes one of the pillars, that will prepare organizations for long-term prosperity, help to successfully navigate change and master the transformation.

What defines a resilient organization? This is how Gartner in 2020 Strategic Road Map for Business Continuity Management puts it:

Resilient organizations are those that rebound and prosper after business disruption, because they’re … adaptive, elastic and sustainable in the face of disruption. Response, recovery, and contingency are the basis or resilience.

To become resilient in this sense, organizations need to develop certain distinguishing characteristics, that will help and organization to rebound, adapt and grow, when facing disruption. Let us take a closer look at these.

Employee engagement has emerged as one critical factor for organizational success in today’s competitive business world. According to Gallup organizations with high employee engagement are up to 20% more profitable, than their counterparts, that score low on the engagement spectrum. High employee engagement also leads to higher talent retention rates, more innovation and fewer mental health issues among their staff. Yes, to succeed in this dimension, organizations will have to come up with a strong purpose, that can unite people and let them be proud of doing something great. Yes – they will need the clarity of strategic direction – both in communication and in action. And yes – they will need to nurture the environment of psychological safety and a positive collaborative culture.

The biggest worry of many HR departments in the context of the corporate work is employee disengagement. Is this challenge new? Is attributable to the current surge of remote work?

No, good HR managers and corporate executives are tackling this issue for a long time now. But the current multidimensional disruption of the way we used to work employee engagement might be the single most important advantage to creating a great business with better retention, better results on the books and a comparative advantage over the competitors.

As we had faced the COVID pandemic in 2020, the employee engagement actually [and somewhat unexpectedly to all who thought the only way to engage workers is to watch them work] went up:

The biggest worry of many HR departments in the context of the Organizational coaching targets systemic change within an organization. Different from individual business coaching, the focus of the effort is on the whole organization or specific parts of the organization.   

Unlike team coaching, where the goal isto enable a single team (leader and direct reports) to work better together, the goal of organizational coaching is to help the organization to improve and evolve in the desired direction.

Today, the corporate world sits in more meetings than ever before. Executives report they are spending at least half of their time in meetings. With extensive use of remote work and home office, many meetings have been moved from the conference room to the online platforms. Initially, many hoped to be lucky to escape the office meeting madness, just to find themselves in the completely new dimension of long, tedious, boring and unproductive video calls.

For many employees, online meetings are turning into extensive, dreadful and frustrating waste of time. At the same time, online meetings are the only way to have a direct personal collaboration on a distributed team. They are essential for creating conditions for teamwork, decision making, creativity, and innovation, fostering relationships and ensuring proper information exchange.

At the post-pandemic new normal, the way we are doing sales is not the same as it once was. 
Before COVID-19, building up a client relationship involved series of touches via emails and phone calls, following by personal meetings and addressing questions of both sides. For large institutional clients and professional associations, there would usually be festive Grand Product Launch party with speakers, networking and further demos and incentives and a happy hour for the selected customers to further strengthen the emotional bond with the new product (and to boost sales) while rubbing elbows during and exclusive wine tasting.

We live in a world, which is becoming more and more globally connected. As the technologies allow unlimited collaboration at the distance, virtual work had picked up significantly in the last decades and today nearly everyone works virtually, in one way or another, at least among the knowledge workers. Its popularity grows continuously and only businesses that are ready to embrace this trend, have a chance to be relevant in the near future.

The current COVID-19 pandemic brought virtual collaboration to the spotlight and appeared to be the fastest accelerator of corporate digitalisation. Apart of the pandemic, what has been driving this trend? And what are the opportunities, that evolve for businesses and organisations, as the world grows closer in the digital wirelessness?

Nowadays our organisational challenges are so complex, that no single person can solve them. Instead, it requires a team, an outstanding, motivated, engaged and cohesive bunch with a strong vision and hunger for success. The better they work as a group, the greater the success. They stick together, because combined they outperform the sum of the parts on any scale.