Collaboration in the enterprise: what is at stake?

More than an issue, collaboration in business appears to be a necessity. It has become essential in recent years, and seems to be a means of success, just like the various factors of production (editor's note: labor, capital, productivity). Indeed, collaboration promotes productivity in small and medium-sized companies and is therefore an important factor for growth. The development of a "collaborative intelligence" requires the implementation of collaborative practices and tools. Atolia gives you some key points about collaboration in business.

What is collaboration? Collaboration "is the act of working or thinking together to achieve a goal". Indeed, the use of structured collaboration methods encourages communication behaviors. These methods are designed to increase the success rate of teams when they work together to solve problems together.

Finally, collaboration is primarily a way of working and an attitude: teamwork, sharing ideas and being unique in the workplace. Collaboration is about tools, like Atolia, to bring tasks together and communicate effectively.

The key points of collaboration and their objectives

1) Improve productivity

The development of collaboration in a team paradoxically leads to a better performance per person (since the tasks appear to be better distributed and take on a meaning for the worker, who understands the collective issue), but also per team.

Simply because the different modules offered by collaborative management tools are the agenda (which centralizes appointments) and instant messaging (which reduces emails, which still represent 2 hours per day for 56% of employees!) These modules also enable real-time collaboration with the whole team but also with specific people.

To conclude, this allows you to limit the loss of time as well as to synthesize or circulate information.

2) Promote knowledge sharing

Collaborative management tools have another important advantage: they contribute to knowledge sharing and referencing. Employees have access to content, can view, modify, share and retrieve it. They are therefore informed, concerned and can more easily participate in the decision-making process.

3) Develop a new project management

As previously mentioned, by bringing together all the actors of the organization on a common platform, collaborative solutions link the operational and decision-making processes. These solutions provide a global vision of the company's activities while integrating planning, monitoring and analysis functions.

Although the impact of these solutions on a company's performance cannot really be measured, collaboration contributes to the development of "collective intelligence" (i.e. a company's ability to adapt to its challenges, increase its innovations, build customer loyalty, and generate ideas and transform them into profitable activities).

Thus, one of the ways to foster collective intelligence appears to be to encourage teams to share information via a collaborative platform, in a deliberate way, to allow them to share files they are working on but also to participate in their colleagues' projects.

4) Fostering the social climate

The last point that collaboration in teams can bring to the fore is the development of a healthy social climate. This is achieved through the quasi-systematic interaction of team members.

To conclude, collaboration in a company is an important process in the development of its activities: it allows, among other things, to improve productivity, to promote the sharing of knowledge, to develop a new project management or to promote the social climate. Thus, collaboration is a challenge but also a means to success!