Understanding the most common hurdles to collaboration.
There are many benefits associated with collaborative working. By fostering a collaborative environment within your organization, you can promote greater transparency within the company, encourage your employees to be more creative and productive and let everyone understand how they can contribute to the success of the company.
In the same manner, by collaborating with other businesses and organizations, you can focus on your main competencies and continuously improve on the company?s performance. ?Collaboration can lead to enhance responsiveness and reduce lead time, leverage resources and capabilities within the supply chain and minimize the inherent risk of any new investment by sharing it with your partners.
Uncovering the Challenges to Effective Collaboration in the Workplace
Unfortunately, it must be noted that there can be several hurdles along the way. Let’s face it. You need to overcome a lot of challenges before you can finally implement a truly collaborative environment within the workplace. So, what are the barriers to effective collaboration? Here are some of them.
The existence of workplace silos. “Siloing” refers to the destructive competition that occurs between various departments within an organization. It refers to the lack of communication, incompatibility of goals, jealousy and even outright hostility between departments. Needless to say, the existence of such culture can negatively affect your employees’ productivity and bring your business down to its knees.
To discourage power struggles within your business, you should change your company’s reward system, encourage people from different teams to work together, give recognition to those who work across organizational boundaries, and encourage communication and transparency within the organization. You also need to encourage them to focus on providing the best service to your customers.?
Difficulty of transferring information. There are two types of knowledge ? tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. While explicit knowledge is relatively easy to document and transfer to another individual, transferring tacit knowledge can be a challenge since it cannot be easily communicated through words or symbols. Such information, like observation of others or practice of a skill, can only be revealed through extensive personal contact or regular interaction with an individual. So, if there is no strong connection between the two parties, the transfer of such information will never take place.
Contrary to what some people believe, collaboration is more than just a mere buzzword. Used correctly, it can help improve the way you do your business and help determine your success in the business world.
