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As people's skill sets get increasingly specialized, collaboration as a practice becomes more important than ever. But what does that mean exactly? What is collaboration?

Although "collaboration" has become a bit of a corporate buzzword, that doesn't mean that it's an empty cliche. On the contrary, collaboration in the workplace is what makes teamwork successful. It's really that simple.

However your organization collaborates, it does so all the time, constantly (even now). In fact, collaboration is so ingrained in the way people work nowadays that we rarely even notice when we're doing it.

That said, it's worth taking a step back to evaluate how you and your people collaborate. Why? Because organizations that collaborate well are likely to be more financially successful, more culturally aligned, and have higher engagement rates.

What is collaboration?

Collaboration is when a group of people come together and contribute their expertise for the benefit of a shared objective, project, or mission. It's a photographer working with a designer to create a cover image, or a technology department regularly convening with the marketing team to plug away at quarterly goals. In other words, collaboration is the process of group work.

But collaboration isn't just a means to work together towards a common goal. It's also an excellent way to encourage innovation and creativity. When individuals with a diverse range of skills and backgrounds come together, it leads to the exchange of unique perspectives and ideas. This can result in more innovative solutions and creative problem-solving that may not have been possible with just one person working on the task.

By leveraging the collective knowledge, experience, and expertise of team members, new and exciting ideas can be generated that an individual could not have thought of alone. Emphasizing collaboration can lead to a culture of innovation where everyone is encouraged to think outside the box and share their ideas and perspectives.

Innovation and creativity are crucial for organizations that want to remain competitive and stay ahead of the curve. By prioritizing collaboration, companies can foster an environment that encourages innovation and creativity, which can ultimately lead to greater success in the long run.

Why collaboration is important

1. It helps us problem-solve

What do you do when you're stumped? Say you've made a lot of progress on your project, but you've encountered a roadblock which seems to withstand everything you throw at it. You're out of ideas, progress has screeched to a grinding halt, and your deadline is rapidly approaching. Do you give up?

No, of course not; you ask for help or find another perspective. You might schedule a brain-storm/whiteboarding session with your team or ask a colleague for their take. In short, you collaborate with your team to solve the problem at hand. When a group of people pool their knowledge, skills, and expertise, then talk problems out and debate potential solutions, projects that were stalled will begin to move forward once again.

But collaboration doesn't have to be a last resort. Collaboration ought to inform the way your team works-it should be baked in. The more eyes on a given project from the get-go, the easier it becomes to spot problems (and solve them).

2. Collaboration brings people (and organizations) closer together

If you're finding that certain teams in your organization rarely interact with each other, that teams and departments are operating in isolated silos, you might want to try putting together a mixed-skills team. These are generally ad hoc teams that tackle projects which require people with diverse skill sets and areas of expertise.

For instance, a mixed-skills team might include a product designer, a user experience designer, a developer, and a content writer. It's essentially a new team set up to collaborate for a period on a shared project. In doing so, you've brought together members from three (or four) different teams, created a common purpose between them, and set up connections which will serve all of you in the future.

In short, you've used collaboration to break down some walls in your organization, and tighten up connections between departments.

3. Collaboration helps people learn from each other

One of the best things about working collaboratively with people who bring different skill sets and backgrounds to the table is learning from their experience. Collaborating with team members or even different teams should be thought of as a learning experience, and you should try to make the most of it.

This means asking for feedback and opinions, sharing knowledge, finding out how your collaborators approach their side of the project, and gaining a better sense of how they work. Learning from colleagues is not just a benefit of collaboration, it's the first step towards building a workplace culture centered around learning and development.

Teams that collaborate not only have an opportunity to learn from each other-their mistakes, successes, failures, workflow, etc.-they'll also gain an understanding of the other team's perspective. You get a chance to hear their side of things: their pain points, priorities, even the way they think. Which can be extremely valuable as you work together going forward.

4. It opens up new channels for communication

Working with new people from different areas of your business also opens up channels that would otherwise remain closed. Finding new ways to communicate and share information is hugely important to the success of any business, which is why collaboration should be utilized whenever possible to form bonds between departments.

Creating a more cohesive, open workplace benefits everyone because, according to David Hassel, "maintaining regular, direct communication with team members, helps you gain valuable insights into the operations of each department and be able to resolve issues quickly." On top of that, it brings everyone a little closer to each other and hones the overall mission of your organization.

A lot of collaboration tools, like an intranet for example, do just that. They're designed to essentially open up your business so that all areas of the organization can communicate with each other and keep tabs on what other teams are working on through news updates, announcements, events, discussions channels, you name it.

5. Collaboration boosts morale across your organization

As connections are made between teams and departments, people will naturally trust each other more, which can gradually boost the morale of your entire organization. After all, organizations aren't going to be successful if there's a lack of trust and low morale. Regularly working together with people outside of your own team or department is one of the most effective ways to build trust.

This also works in reverse: the higher your company's morale, the higher the likelihood that your people will feel comfortable working alongside team members from other departments. This is also attractive to top performing candidates who are increasingly looking for more open, engaged workplaces.

6. It leads to higher retention rates

Because collaboration lays the foundation for a more open, connected, and engaged workplace, it's appealing to future and current employees-perhaps more-so than organizations that're siloed and disconnected. An atmosphere where collaboration is front and center is important to your people, and it'll go a long way toward preventing them from looking for work elsewhere.

Connection matters to people, especially in the workplace. We want to work with people we trust, who understand and respect our points of view, and who work well with others, especially those who come from different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Simply put, working collaboratively makes this possible.

7. Collaboration makes us more efficient workers

Working independently has its advantages. We can focus entirely on one project without having to factor in how much time we'll lose if we get distracted, or how to wrangle a team together in time to meet a short deadline. If the task at hand requires independence, then by all means, go for it.

But for many types of projects, collaboration is just more efficient. When the project is complex and demanding, we have to be able to admit to ourselves that we'll need help. It'll have to be a group effort. And that's where collaboration comes in. It helps us divide up a heavy workload, find creative solutions to tough problems, and wrap our heads around the big picture.

An organization that makes collaboration a big part of its culture is bound to normalize this style of working, thereby creating a more efficient (and more appealing) workplace.

How to promote collaboration at work

Here are some ways to promote collaboration at work:

Use collaboration tools and software, such as instant messaging, video conferencing, and cloud-based document sharing systems. These can help to facilitate communication and information sharing between team members, regardless of their location or time zone.

Create cross-functional teams by bringing together employees from different departments or areas of expertise to work on a common project or goal. This can encourage knowledge sharing, creative problem-solving, and a more holistic approach to decision-making.

Set clear goals and expectations for collaboration by defining the scope of the project, the roles and responsibilities of each team member, and the timeline for completion. This can help to ensure that everyone is working towards the same end goal, and prevent misunderstandings or conflicts from arising.

Celebrate and recognize collaboration efforts and successes by acknowledging the contributions of individual team members, highlighting the impact of their work on the organization, and providing opportunities for team members to share their experiences and insights with others.

By promoting collaboration at work, you can create a more connected, engaged, and efficient workplace, where employees feel valued and supported. It can lead to better problem-solving, increased innovation, and higher morale and retention rates, contributing to the overall success of your organization. So don't hesitate to prioritize collaboration in your organization, and reap the benefits of a more collaborative and productive workplace!

Conclusion

If this doesn't describe your organization, don't fret! Creating a collaborative workplace takes time and effort, but the payoff is well worth it. To kick-off the process at your workplace, start with new hires. Find ways to get them out of their team, their comfort zone, and give them a chance to connect with others. Give them projects that demand collaborative solutions. Gradually, your organization will begin to see firsthand why collaboration is important.

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Why the best companies have mastered collaboration

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Ever wonder why collaboration is important? This article looks at 7 reasons why collaboration is the key to creating an extraordinary workplace.

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Why is collaboration for Singaporeans to learn how to collaborate well?

Crises like the Covid-19 pandemic highlight the importance of effective collaboration for long-term success. As the world becomes more receptive to remote work and schools transition to e-learning, it is important for us to gain the digital confidence to understand the new platforms and processes fast in order to get the most out of remote collaboration.

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Big Cheese Photo/Getty Images

We've made our coronavirus coverage free for all readers. To get all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.

Crises like the Covid-19 pandemic highlight the importance of effective collaboration for long-term commercial success. Particularly in a crisis, organizations need to pull together experts with unique, cross-functional perspectives to solve rapidly changing, complex problems that have long-term implications. The diversity of experience allows a group to see risks and opportunities from different angles so that it can generate new solutions and adapt dynamically to changing situations.

Research shows, however, that anxiety makes people more risk-averse in a crisis; as a result, they are less likely to seek out differing perspectives. They tend to fall back on actions and solutions that have worked in the past - what researchers call "threat rigidity." The desire to try to bring things under control can also lead to a go-it-alone mentality. And as resources (finances, job opportunities, even physical supplies) dry up during a crisis, people often focus on self-preservation. As a result, collaboration across an organization can break down. Our research on the 2008 financial crisis, however, shows that collaboration leads to sustainably higher commercial performance. In this article, we offer seven actions that leaders can take to foster collaboration.

We collected a decade's worth of data on collaboration and financial performance across dozens of organizations, including professional service firms, financial institutions, and health care organizations. In interviews with some of the subjects, we asked open-ended questions about how they handled work during the crisis. Very different collaboration patterns became obvious. The exhibit below shows the outcomes for one law firm, which were typical across many of the companies we studied.

Records from project and financial databases showed how partners worked before, during, and after the crisis and their relative performance outcomes. To control for outliers, we excluded the partners with the highest and lowest performance historically and those in groups that were likely to flourish during a downturn, such as the bankruptcy and restructuring practices. We separated the remaining 400-plus partners into deciles based on the proportion of their work conducted with other partners versus on their own. Then we plotted their respective revenue generated during the period.

The results were stark. The most highly collaborative workers - the top 10% - grew their business during the crisis and continued that upward trajectory afterward (see the green line). The performance of the middle group (second and third deciles) declined slightly during the crisis, but their revenues started to recover within a year (see the yellow line). People in the third group (the bottom 70%) hunkered down and dramatically reduced their collaboration with others. They guarded their clients and hoarded work. The revenue generated by this group contracted during the crisis and still had not recovered five years after the recession had ended. We saw a similar pattern in other kinds of organizations.

Why did people work this way? As uncertainty and stress increased during the crisis, the highly collaborative people evolved their approach to developing business and executing work. They expanded their network across functional and industry silos and increased the number of colleagues they worked with. They were willing to pitch in on others' projects. They talked about how, as the crisis evolved and pressure rose, they teamed up with trusted colleagues to identify and pursue new opportunities - even when it meant getting less personal glory on a project-by-project basis. As a result, they ended up working on a wide variety of clients or projects, essentially spreading their bets across different kinds of opportunities. It's not that they hit only home runs; it's that they had more at-bats, and they played different positions as needed.

The self-focused, uncollaborative people took a wholly different approach. They erected walls around their projects, pushed colleagues away, held their business and clients closely, and hoarded work. As a result of their self-interested behavior, their network diminished. They had no "tribe" to help bring them into existing opportunities and to identify new ones. In one health care organization, for example, when grant funding started to dry up, the loners suffered because they weren't involved in enough different kinds of research initiatives to keep money flowing into their labs.

The obvious conclusion: The degree of collaboration during a crisis has a huge impact on whether companies and individual employees thrive.

Here is some advice for how leaders can promote collaboration:

1. Encourage naïve questions and constructive challenge. At McKinsey, where one of us (Heidi) once worked, this was called the "obligation to dissent": It's not only accepted but expected that people challenge each other's assumptions and offer new ideas. This means that nobody feels like she risks looking foolish by asking teammates with different functional backgrounds from hers to explain their thinking or define a technical term. Involving people with a wide variety of skills in an effort to tackle novel and complicated problems can help the group collectively see potential risks or solutions that would elude individual experts - especially when they are encouraged to be inquisitive.

2. Watch out for hoarding behaviors. Be imaginative about data sources that might show you behavioral patterns inside your organization: Nearly all leaders with whom we have worked have been surprised that they have access to various kinds of data that can show collaboration patterns (e.g., project management databases used to track grant funding or product development, CRM systems that show sales pipelines).

If such data isn't available, use pulse surveys to capture people's self-reported actions; a well-designed three-question survey can be completed in just a few minutes and reveal places where individualistic behavior is starting to creep in. For example, it might ask those surveyed the extent to which they agree or disagree - on a to-5 scale (1=strongly disagree; 5=strongly agree) - with these statements: 1) The group has a shared sense of purpose; 2) there is a high degree of trust within the group; and 3) colleagues regularly take credit for the work of others.

3. Connect with the front lines. Make direct contact with people down the hierarchy so you have unfiltered information about people's actions and states of mind. (This is especially critical when people are working remotely.) Such interactions can help leaders understand how employees are coping, identify areas where risks of go-it-alone behaviors are more likely, and establish linkages among people so that they are better able to support each other. Arlene Zalayet, an executive at Liberty Mutual who has 1,800 employees in her department, recently began holding 18 check-ins a month by video with groups, including entry-level workers. In one of these town halls, an administrative worker shared how Covid-19 was affecting her African-American community, sparking an important discussion about the value of the company's diversity efforts and what it would take to support different kinds of workers through this crisis.

4. Reinforce the business's purpose and goals frequently. A belief that their work fulfills a higher purpose motivates people to think and act in a more collective fashion - to be more open to collaboration. Clearly understanding the business goals helps people see how their own knowledge contributes to - but doesn't fully satisfy - the complex needs of the business. Leaders need to lower employees' sense of uncertainty and boost their confidence to reach out to colleagues. So even if your message hasn't changed, you need to repeat it because the world has changed and employees need to know that the existing direction still holds.

5. Get team members to reflect on their preferred ways of working. This includes the leader. When you're under stress, you're more likely to retreat to your comfort zone, so it's crucial that you think about what kinds of behaviors come most naturally to you. When the pressure builds, are you more likely to pick up the phone to commiserate and brainstorm with a colleague or to hole up and go it alone? As part of this process, revisit that behavioral assessment you completed last year. And get others' perspectives. For instance, ask people with whom you've been sheltering what they've observed you do when you're stressed. As team members becomes more aware of their typical styles, they can start to figure out how to use those tendencies to work more effectively as a group.

6. Play to your strengths. Rather than trying to change your natural tendencies - which is almost impossible during the stress of a crisis - focus instead on consciously using your style to improve collaboration. If you are naturally drawn to working on teams, then use your enthusiasm to foster an esprit de corps - for example, by calling out when the team has reached even a small milestone. Boosting engagement and morale isn't "soft work"; it leads to quantifiable gains in productivity and other "hard" business outcomes. We saw this firsthand with Gillian, a senior manager at one of the Big 4 accounting firms we recently advised. She deliberately builds team members' confidence and trust in each other's competence by highlighting their expertise, calling out ways their knowledge helps to achieve the team's goals and then widely sharing team-based success stories. If you share Gillian's teamwork orientation, just be careful you don't overdo it and join many teams at once. Be selective and focus on the highest-priority projects.

If you're inclined to work independently, you can use that tendency to improve teamwork by helping drive execution. Sameer, a finance director at a software company that we studied, has been nicknamed the "teamwork tsar" because he's the one most likely to point out when working as a group is worth it and when independent work will be more effective. His go-it-alone preference is a healthy counterpoint that keeps the team focused on the task when others might get bogged down in seeking consensus or when group discussion leads down an unproductive rabbit hole.

Leaders need to appreciate that it doesn't take a single type of person to boost collaboration; they need to draw on the diversity of behavioral styles and coach each team member to play their own part in boosting cross-silo working.

7. Champion collaborative leaders and teams. Many leaders undermine their talk about the importance of collaboration when they focus praise exclusively on individual employees for hitting a sales target or working overtime. While recognizing individual effort, also acknowledge the team that helped make the person a hero by calling out the specific actions it took to provide support and the ways all of its members accomplished a goal together. Especially when employees are working from home, leaders should emphasize the role of supporting players by mentioning family members' role in making it possible for workers to be productive.

At some point leaders should examine and address organizational structures such as compensation and incentive systems and hiring practices to see whether they support or undermine a culture of collaboration. But obviously, that will probably have to wait until the crisis has passed. In the meantime, try applying the seven strategies. By promoting cross-silo collaboration, your organization is more likely to survive the current hard times and thrive when they're over.

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7 Strategies for Promoting Collaboration in a Crisis

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We've made our coronavirus coverage free for all readers. To get all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter. Crises like the Covid-19 pandemic highlight the importance of effective collaboration for long-term commercial success.