# data[].attributes.body
Important to collaborate well:

· Efficiency

· Saves on cost and resources

· Planned and no surprises or unexpected can be reduced to minimum

· Relationship building and enhance/strengthen mutual understanding
Thomas's commend as 'best possible outcome of their common objective' is right on the spot!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One of the biggest factors that contribute to the success of any business is whether or not its employees are able to perform together a team. With increasing competition, it has become extremely important to encourage creativity in the office, in order to improve productivity and promote healthy employee relationships.

Working in teams enables employees to be quicker and more effective in their work, as compared to people who work on projects on their own. Collaborating also makes employees more responsible, which goes a long way in raising their motivation levels, especially when teams work virtually.

Collaboration in the Workplace

Collaboration is said to take place when two individuals or a group of people work together towards achieving a common goal by sharing their ideas and skills. It can happen in traditional as well as virtual teams. With advancements in technology, using cloud-based programs to share files and communicate has become commonplace.

A few other important aspects that collaboration brings to the table include:

Brainstorming- Collaboration allows team members to come together on a common platform and work towards the achievement of a common goal by thinking, brainstorming, and offering various perspectives to provide solutions.

Providing Value- Working towards the same goal inspires in the team members with a strong sense of purpose. The team sees value in working together as the common goal gives them a meaningful reason to work together, along with receiving mutual benefits for the company as well as the team.

Equal Partaking- Collaboration provides every team member with equal opportunities to participate and communicate their ideas.

Here's why businesses should encourage collaboration among their teams:
It Promotes Self-Analysis
Collaboration challenges people to think, articulate and receive clarity about their competencies. It serves as a mirror that gives them a glimpse of their strengths and weaknesses. Because two heads are better than one, teams work better together and plug each other's gaps.
It Results in Problem Solving
When a variety of knowledge and skills are pooled, it creates a talent pool that is vast and more competent, able and experienced. Virtual collaboration minimizes or even eliminates the need for finances and infrastructure. Thanks to the Internet, businesses can gain better market reach and organizations with people from diverse backgrounds can thrive.
It Makes You Look at the Bigger Picture
No two people are the same, and when you have several people from different backgrounds working for you, you will need to know how to leverage those differences and identify how they can complement each other. You also need to understand that even if the project does not shape up the way you wanted it to in the end, the partnership could still achieve a great deal.
It Teaches
When your teams are collaborating, they are essentially learning new things from each other. Your organization becomes a body which encourages a culture of continuous learning, and supports that learning through opportunities for growth and development, as well as through safety nets for failures. Whenever team members collaborate, they enhance their capacity to go and grow beyond their comfort zones and take your business to new heights.

Advantages of Collaboration

Pooling of Talent and Strengths- When members of a team collaborate, they are able to utilize the knowledge, experience and skills of everyone involved. For instance, one member may struggle with presentation skills, but might know all about the technical aspects involved. Effective collaboration will allow all the members to share their talent and find the most optimal solution to every problem. This will augment the chances of the business to achieve more in less time.

Development of Employee Skills- Collaboration is mutually beneficial for the employees as well as the organization because when they work together, interact and share ideas, they see and understand how others work, think, negotiate and operate. This gives all the employees a chance to pick up skills from their colleagues or team mates and build upon their strengths. These newly-learned skills can then be practiced in their own field to look at things with a new perspective and make improvements and enhancements.

Speed up Solutions- Collaboration speeds things up. It fast-tracks progress. A problem that may take months to get resolved when handled by a single individual, but may take just a few hours to resolve when several other members employ their unique standpoints and expertise to get things done. These viewpoints will open up several doors to multiple ideas and solutions that a single individual may not be able to come up with.

Increased Efficiency
Collaborating in the workplace enables businesses to finish important projects and meet crucial deadlines efficiently. With multiple individuals working on a project, the work can be divided up equally and efficiently between those with the time and the expertise to handle specific tasks. This also significantly reduces the project delivery time. Often referred to as the divide and conquer strategy, it entails teaming up of several individuals together, dividing up the tasks among them, and accomplishing the project in relatively less time.
Enhance Employee Retention and Job Satisfaction
As mentioned, collaboration brings meaning and adds value to the way team members perceive their job. Because of this, they feel good about what they do. The sense of team spirit is felt most strongly when victories can be shared. Employees are more likely to continue working for a business longer when they have strong ties with the people they work with and feel that they're a part of something important.

Collaboration Amongst Virtual Teams

While these principles are the same for virtual teams, there are added difficulties when your employees are spread out over different geographical locations or even when all employees live in the same area but some team members work from home. Here, communication is key. Ensuring remote teams are also working during the set work hours is also important. Luckily, time tracking software can easily track employee hours and ensure all team members are pulling their weight.

Tips and tricks: Get notified and stay on top of what's happening on your projects with Nutcache notification center. This feature notifies you about all activity occurring in your projects. Notifications are a great way to improve team collaboration and reduce inbox overload.

Conclusion

Progressive companies are increasingly realizing the value of collaboration and looking for ways to foster it within their teams, both traditional and virtual. So if you want to see your business prosper and turn your workforce into productive superheroes, it's high time you fostered a collaborative spirit among them. The above tips should give you a fair idea of the importance and the benefits of encouraging collaboration among your employees.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Importance of Collaboration in the Workplace

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One of the biggest factors that contribute to the success of any business is whether or not its employees are able to perform together a team. With increasing competition, it has become extremely important to encourage creativity in the office, in order to improve productivity and promote healthy employee relationships.

# data[].attributes.body
Collaboration between local establishments

# data[].attributes.body
For e best possible outcome of their common objective

# data[].attributes.body
Article on collaboration as follow

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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.

If our free content helps you to contend with these challenges, please consider subscribing to HBR. A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Strategies for Promoting Collaboration in a Crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

# data[].attributes.body
I think both of your personal responses are correct

# data[].attributes.body
1) we need to collaborate to do well because as a tem we can do much better
2)

# data[].attributes.body
3) article on collaboration
Give Your Remote Team Unstructured Time for Collaboration (hbr.org)
4)  comment to thomas response
right on!