Here are six tips to developing a collaborative culture that keeps workforces motivated, connected, and creative no matter where employees do most of their work.”>Companies that successfully navigated through the complexities of keeping a business moving forward during a global pandemic are now facing new challenges.
Talk the walk
Give culture a voice
- Seek input from other CEOs, from mentors, and especially from employees
- Make the words that describe the company culture a mantra
- Use the mantra with every audience – from employees, to customers, to investors, and the public
- Put the firm’s cultural values front and center
Anticipate and prepare for visible and stealth roadblocks and speed-bumps
Collaborative cultures succeed when each employee, generalist or specialist, has some opportunity every day to do what they do best– and each employee recognizes the responsibility to work with other teams toward common goals
Customers can be the rallying cry
The best reason for collaboration is the customer – humans with names, responsibilities, goals, and pain points
- Tackling a customer issue cross-functionally creates opportunities for new people to hear directly from the customer or from the sales team
- Embrace failure
- Invite employees to join in fixing a problem they didn’t cause
Engagement is the bedrock of collaboration
People build connections by doing things together
- Prior to the pandemic, we were used to thinking about engagement as face-to-face
- With hybrid work models set to be the new norm, collaborative cultures depend on new models of engagement
- Invest in tools that will improve collaboration: faster internet, unrestricted video conferencing, larger high-resolution monitors, better headsets, and higher quality cameras
Collaboration does not equal compromise
In a collaborative culture, meetings are conducted (in person or virtually) for the purpose of open and honest dialogue
- Participants commit to listening and actively considering all points of view and then supporting the decision made on the information shared
- Every person in the organization impacts cultural collaboration
Build an intentional and repeatable process that makes new hires’sticky’
Connecting with the newest employees
- Start with the cultural conversation
- Create opportunities for new hires to share and discuss work with longer-term employees.
- Assign each person a mentor and make mentoring part of that mentor’s job
- Help new hires understand where they fit into the organization and their work contributes tactically and strategically
