Why Collaboration is Transformation

What lies at the heart of a transformative business and what central role does collaboration play? 

Will collaboration be made harder in the future of work? These questions and more keep some technology leaders up at night. This roundtable makes steps to answer them.

With Mark Chillingworth moderating, the speakers of the roundtable include:

• Kris See, IT Manager, Cisco
• Esteban Remecz; CIO, VP Information Technology and Digital, Iochpe-Maxion, S. A.
• Roberto Maranca, Data Excellence VP, Schneider Electric
• Alison Davis, CIO, Natural History Museum

Value engagement

Like problem-solving, adaptability is a natural result of a collaborative team. If a team understands its function and its end goal, it can prepare for any situation that arises. Change is sure to happen within your field and forecasting that change is predictable for a prepared team. Teams and organisations have to change at a pretty rapid pace, and if your team isn’t aligned, it's easy for change to lead to disaster. Plus, teams that collaborate also communicate. Integrating collaborative tools like Asana and Todoist into your workflow, is the first step to communicating efficiently. Using these, teammates are able to see the work in progress, who’s responsible for it, and how it affects everyone’s work.

A team that knows how to collaborate is comfortable sharing their ideas and adding new processes and tools to the table. That level of participation means teammates can communicate with each other in a clear and direct manner. This brings forth new innovations and ways the team can improve.

Communication is key

So your team is communicating, forecasting change, and problem-solving—but a team can't do this without the exchange of knowledge. If your team is able to bring its expertise to the table, everyone can coach each other, teach new skills, and elevate the team as a whole. And every good team has a diversity of knowledge that will contribute to new approaches to achieving success.

A supported employee is a satisfied employee—one who is comfortable sharing ideas and aligned with team goals, but also prepared to tackle what’s next. And a satisfied team member comes in each day ready to work and help the rest of the team. Engagement is important for many workplace benefits: productivity, profitability, retention, and happiness, to name a few. As more workplaces prioritise employee engagement as a metric for success, it's essential to foster a collaborative environment for better engagement. If you want to be an engaged teammate, consider all the benefits of collaboration in the workplace to improve your own performance and support your team—that’s what it’s all about.

This Studio roundtable was created in partnership with Cisco.