Benefits and disadvantages of businesses coll...

Collaborative work can help you improve your business performance and enhance the team’s skills to work toward a greater goal for the business. Collaboration leads to innovative approaches to projects, new processes to accomplish key tasks and shared ideas on varied responsibilities. There are advantages and disadvantages to collaboration in the workplace. Understanding these pros and cons goes a long way toward addressing any conflict that may crop up as a result. A business may work collaboratively to achieve a number of key business benefits: Knowledge, good practice and information sharing This is key to collaboration, knowing how to share your knowledge with others in a relaxed environment. This is very important because if you have never done a collaboration task before when gathering up a team it could feel very strange at first. You need to be able to make sure your team gets involved by sharing their views, facts or opinions.  You should be able to use people’s strengths when it comes to collaboration, one of these could be budgeting, organisation or leadership. These are very important strengths to have in business, as it can be developed and used in many departments. With your team members collaborating together, people start to think and bringing new ideas to the table. This results in people bouncing ideas off each other toward improving the business services or products. Several thoughts and ideas can come up with different ways to address a situation, thinking of creating, developing, enhancing, improving and having ideas about how to go about the task in hand.

10 KEYS TO ACHIEVE COLLABORATION SUCCESS! #COLLABORATIONHACKS https://t.co/09NZgwANgq #Collaboration #SocBiz #Enterpreneur pic.twitter.com/Blzms20Dxf

— S.M.A.C.talk Podcast @DanielNewmanUV @iSocialFanz (@SMACtalkLIVE) May 9, 2017

Better Communication Unless you don’t have a collaboration system for your team, it likely means that your team relies on communication methods like phone systems, text chat or email. While phone and email are essential, they can lead to broken, incomplete or missing information. Instead of important information being available everyone who needs to know it, it’s buried in individual inboxes. A common problem is that one person was told about something, but never shared that with others on the team who need to know. In short, despite all the communication tools, you can have an information gap. However, there are many cloud-based collaboration options available, so information is more widely available to everyone who needs to know. Information is only valuable if it’s available to the right people at the right times, so they can make use of it for your business. Clarity & Efficiency Through better collaboration, your employees can gain clarity in their roles. Clarity helps each person know what they are supposed to do. They know what others are doing — or not doing. Clarity through collaboration frees employees to focus on specific parts of your task, at specific times — without costly overlap or gaps. This will result in things flowing more smoothly and gets the job done right the first time, which means lower costs for the business, and faster turnaround times. Stronger and united work force  Collaboration really helps people to come together, in ways they might not have before. It helps the team work together and share their thoughts and opinions. This helps people that might have thought they weren’t as appreciated as before. As it can be difficult sometimes in a larger organisation to give praise where praise is deserved. Keeping track of employees work can be difficult, however, they stand out with collaboration. You can keep up to date knowing exactly what they are doing and when they are doing it. For smaller businesses, it can be a way of team members showing off their strengths when working in a team. When people are given a chance to share their views it not only helps them but shows the other people around them that they can do the same. Confidence is a big part of collaboration, your team members need to feel that they are comfortable in sharing their ideas. Employee Strengths When you encourage your employees to work together on projects, you also get the benefit of each person being able to work on activities that are most suited to their specific strengths. Projects can be divided up more effectively based on skills. When employees are doing work they are suited for or are good at, they will do a better job and in turn will achieve more – for themselves and for the company. This creates improved productivity over the long run and also saves you money on hiring and training new employees. People know people. This is a great way for getting to know not just your team members, but also who and what they know. If one person knows three to four other professionals in different companies or sectors this means you can use these people to gather more contacts. This could be an opportunity to collaborate with other businesses too. Access to Better Workers Through the use of cloud collaboration tools, you widen the potential pool of employees. For instance, there are many tools where you are able to hire more remote workers who you otherwise wouldn’t relocate. Also, employees may be able to work from home a few days a week (something important to those with family obligations). You can attract and retain valuable workers by giving them geographical flexibility. Instead of limiting yourself to just those in your immediate area, you can hire the person who’s best for the job, regardless of their location. And if you’re able to hire the best possible workers, you’re more likely to get more done and be more effective as a business owner. Conflicts in Working Styles This can be a major problem, when in a group with different people together to collaborate on one project. There may be a conflict in the working styles of the individuals within the group. This can end up holding up progress on accomplishing the job at hand, while team members disagree and cause conflicts by the different ways team members approach the work. For example, there might be numerous people who want to lead the group or some people whose professional abilities may be better focused somewhere else. This can be very real when you have a collaborative group, you may sometimes end up with too many people trying to lead the group. This will result in not enough members that are willing to do what it takes to get the job done. This will show in other areas of the work environment, causing more tension among the rest of the staff, including those that may not even be involved in the collaborative effort. Another conflict could occur when the stronger personalities within a group are so influential that they manage to take over the discussion and replace their ideas as the result. This can be difficult for people to be comfortable in a situation where their ideas are shared within a group. Timing Collaborations can mean that your campaign moves more slowly because you need to gather information, agreement or check with the other players regarding every decision. You should have a good understanding of the levels of self-sufficiency that you have. Working in a group can also mean that sometimes people may not be as efficient to time keeping as you or someone else may be. Organisation and timekeeping are very important in tasks with a deadline if people do not pull their weight in tasks you may fall behind.