How To Encourage Collaboration With A Startup Environment

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When people say that they received bad customer service from a company, do they mean that they have interacted with everyone from that company or they had a bad encounter with a representative of the company? You bet they had a bad experience with one of the company’s representatives. This shows that every member of a company reflects the values of that company wherever they find themselves. As a startup, one way that you can infuse your company values into all your staff is by encouraging collaboration.

When collaboration is a thing in a workplace, workers understand that their actions are a contribution to the overall success of the team and they have a sense of responsibility to always do the right thing. Collaboration also helps to bring out the best in people, creates unity, gives room for creativity, and develops camaraderie. This article will show you five ways that you can encourage collaboration in your startup environment.

Make Collaboration A Culture:

You cannot force collaboration down the throats of your staff. Make them see collaboration as a work ethic and a way of rather than as an instruction that they have to obey. To do this, you need to be an example. If you want your workers to collaborate with each other, you have to collaborate with them first. Practice democracy rather than dictatorship.

It will not make you less of a leader to ask your employees for suggestions. Involve them in your decisions and reward people who give contributions. When collaboration is a core company value and it is also practiced by the boss, it becomes easy for workers to emulate it.

Let Employees Work on Tasks Together:

When there is a job that needs to be done, allow employees to work together to make sure that the job is done. Create an environment where workers will have to work with people from other departments. When people get accustomed to working with only members of their departments, it creates apathy to working with others. To allow workers to brainstorm and solve issues with members of other departments, you can make use of shared workspaces. There are a lot of shared office spaces in New York that provide an environment for workers to collaborate easily.

Use Collaborative Tools:

The world we find ourselves in is driven by technology. Technology, if not properly harnessed, can create a distance between people even if they are sitting a few feet away from each other. This means that you need to find a way to merge technology and communication to make collaboration easier. Tools like Asana, Google Drive, Slack, Zoom, and so on will go a long way in ensuring collaboration among employees in your startup. Collaborative tools do not only help to build unity among your staff, but it also makes the work process easier and faster.

Bond Outside of Work:

In the workplace, people see themselves as colleagues and treat themselves as such. However, people tend to have a different life from the one that they live at work. Knowing more about a person’s personal life will help you understand them better and the better you understand a person, the easier it is to collaborate with them.

Going for a beer after work or grabbing coffee together in the morning before resumption is a great opportunity for employees to get to know each other better. It becomes very much easier to work as a team when you see others as humans rather than superiors or subordinates.

Internal Training:

Organize occasional internal training for your staff. Let one department teach others how work is done in their department. For example, the safety department can organize fire drills or lecture others on how to respond to a medical emergency. Also, the IT department can teach how to do basic troubleshooting. This will help workers understand what they are all going through and it will breed empathy. Also, this series of training will broaden the knowledge of your workers and make them more skilled.

Conclusion

Every employee in your startup can have the right qualifications and experience to add value to your company, however, it is important to remember that they all have different upbringings. While they are all working to achieve a common goal, remember that they all have diverse training so you cannot force collaboration on them. As a startup, collaboration is a continuous effort that needs to be built from scratch. Everyone needs to be involved in the work. Ask workers how they can make the workplace a collaborative environment and make collaboration a culture.

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