Why Should Collaboration Be An Integral Part Of Your Business Process

We all have different office and work culture but the most obvious similarity that we all have is the WE and THEY. Are you getting this? Collaboration has been around lately and we all saw the rise of Enterprise 2.0 but do we really get it? Do we know how to really collaborate?

Small-medium sized businesses are having a hard time dealing with this one. Imagine the enterprise class companies wherein WE and THEY is a classic culture. Is collaboration hard? Easy? Do we really understand it?

You’re a CEO or a business owner and you want to promote collaboration across your company. If your Project or Operations Manager immediately suggested implementing collaboration tools, fire him/her. Tools are just tools that help us be more efficient and productive but the other side of collaboration is a unique culture that promotes individualism without sacrificing group effort.

If you are watching those dance shows doing fancy and fast steps, you will understand what I’m talking about here. We all have roles to fulfill to achieve the goal of the company.

The WE and THEY will not go away. We humans love to be in the company of like-minded people. True? But this doesn’t mean that we separate ourselves from others. We do this, instead of filling the gap, we make it wider.

Why Should We Collaborate

We always hear “everybody on the same page” during meetings right? That is one goal of collaboration, to make sure that no one is left behind.

It makes us efficient and productive. The more we organize our work, the faster we deliver results and the faster we deliver our results, the more we make clients or our company happy.

I remember reading the book Collaboration and it says that do not do collaboration for collaboration’s sake. To collaborate means to meet business needs and objectives.

Some Tools To Start Your Collaboration Effort

Google Docs – a free online office suite created by Google. It allows users to upload or create documents, spreadsheet, forms and presentations. The creator can also select people who can view or edit documents. And it’s FREE!

Google Wave – They call it the email killer. I think not. Well, it depends how you look at email. Google Wave is a collaboration tool that allows users to create wave and invite people to participate in it. It has drag-and-drop capabilities too.

Collaboration is not rocket science. It’s driven by mutual self-interest to constructively explore and create things that we couldn’t do on our own. But this is just my thought.

Care to share yours?