Fuel Intelligent Collaboration To Boost Employee Engagement

Intelligent Collaboration Tranforms Employee Engagement

Collaboration is hailed as a cornerstone of organizational success, yet leaders often find themselves grappling with collaboration-related challenges. How can leaders cultivate intelligent collaboration that fuels employee engagement without exhausting their teams?

Unlock the secrets to nurturing a culture of intelligent collaboration and empowering employees to raise their hands with energy and enthusiasm.

The Engagement Paradox

This white paper offers a new path forward – one that blends the energy employees want with the customer experience and business results leaders need.

The Pitfalls of Over-Collaboration

As a leader, there are times when you feel like you have to fix collaboration within your organization. Silo mentalities, territorialism, lack of trust, and not seeing the interdependencies between different functions are problems you want to fix.

As you go to fix these collaboration problems, consider one thing: over-collaboration is one of the top three forms of burnout in North America. Everybody’s got to be invited to the meeting, everybody’s got to be CC’d on the email, and everyone’s voice has got to be heard.

We burn out our collaborative superstars. They get drawn into these collaborative nodes, spending 60% of their day doing collaborative work and ending up doing the real job from eight to midnight.

How do you create intelligent collaboration in your organization?

The Collaborative Spectrum

Enhance collaboration within your workforce by implementing a spectrum that encompasses different levels of engagement:

Non-involvement:
Recognize that non-involvement can be a valuable contribution in certain situations.

Cooperate when asked:
Acknowledge the need for cooperation when specific tasks or projects require individual contributions without full collaboration.

Willingly contribute:
Encourage team members to willingly contribute their ideas and expertise when they perceive opportunities to add value.

Actively co-create:
Promote active co-creation among team members, fostering collaboration to achieve collective success.

Proactively partner:
Proactive partnering is essential in certain situations, fostering a culture where individuals actively collaborate and prioritize each other’s success. Partnering provides a framework for transformative leadership. It involves going beyond immediate needs and envisioning long-term benefits.

For instance, when someone shares research that they believe will be valuable to a colleague in the future, they are proactively partnering. Do you need everybody in your organization to be at that end of the spectrum 100% of the time? No, that’s ludicrous and unsustainable.

Building a Collaborative Culture

When somebody is sitting at the table, the real question is, do they know where they need to be on that spectrum in order to create value? What we’re looking for is a culture where we build the challenge function, where if people feel they’re over-involved, they put up their hand. If people feel like they’re under-involved, they put up their hand. If they’re feeling over-informed and beleaguered with emails, they put up their hand. If they feel like they’re under-informed and not in the loop, they put up their hand