Collaboration is critical for optimal decision making, aligned implementation of business strategy and business efficiencies.

“Collaboration is important in decision-making and communication: When people work together, more perspectives can be surfaced in the decision-making process, and information can be disseminated more quickly…(and) collaboration can help an organization marshal resources from different areas to provide business continuity.” 

Building a collaborative organisation

To understand how to build a collaborative organisation you need to understand why people don’t collaborate. The greatest barriers to collaboration are: lack of psychological safety, lack of skills, lack of trust, lack of vulnerability, leadership role modelling, concentration of power and poor/no technology solutions.

Several of these antecedents of collaboration (vulnerability, trust, psychological safety) are inherent in face to face moments and can be more easily built and sustained when we are physically together. It’s not that innovations happen at the water cooler, but that psychological safety and vulnerability comes from those small moments when we have idle chat about our days, lives and work that build intimacy and trust. Elements that are essential for collaboration.  All these elements can be created in a virtual or hybrid work experience, but they need to be designed. We cannot rely on serendipity as much as we have in the past – we need to design for it.

Leadership, technology and carefully curated collaboration moments are critical design elements for future work models that are resilient and adaptable. Indeed, organisations that proactively collaborate leveraging cloud-based platforms and disciplined data sharing experience four times the revenue growth of peers.4 And organisations with a dynamic and self-directed culture are 56% more likely to get their products to market first.

Deloitte analysis has found that since the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns globally, over 75% of office workers have used at least two new types of technology to collaborate for work purposes. A case study example can be seen through the World Health Organisation, who have used ‘Workplace’ from Facebook (a Deloitte alliance partner) to provide press briefings, share resources, and create an online collaborative platform for its staff located across the globe.4

Globally, organisations across the world have been embedding collaborative work practices into their work models. Key examples are:

Nestle runs a “collaborating for positive impact” program for Creating Shared Value (CSV) to open up internal collaborative work methods and external partnerships with multilateral agencies, governments, academia, NGOs and industry bodies. Nestle has coupled this with agile work methods to recognise and kill bad ideas fast, collaborate efficiently with cross-functional teams and achieve faster time to market.

American Express established ‘BlueWork’, a workplace strategy for its 63,000 employees around a set of flexible working principles and collaboration across work styles. There are four work styles; home, roam, club and hub, and employees are grouped into one and follow guidelines set for each.  This has delivered better utilisation of existing real estate footprints, directly translating onto P&Ls and an increase in retention and reported productivity.

The first is to recognise that hope and “wait and see” are not strategies. Similarly, black and white “all physical” or “all digital” statements while enticingly simplistic don’t unlock the value and resilience that comes with integrated and future facing work models. Models that employees want, and that have enabled many ‘born digital’ organisations to thrive.

The first step is to look at design principles linked to the organisation’s strategy and purpose. How does each principle help drive business outcomes, talent attraction and reinforce the organisation’s strategy? If you play out each principle in the extreme as an incisive guide to make decisions, what are the benefits and risks of each option? How will the benefits be unlocked and how do we mitigate the risks with new rituals, ways of working and supporting technology?

The future of collaboration requires curated connections, supporting technology and a raft of new rituals. Resilience, adaptability and collaboration are underpinned by disciplined practices that are well designed. It’s time for organisations to carefully design, experiment and evolve these new disciplines to thrive now, and into the ever changing future.

• Collaboration is a critical enabler to build organisational resilience
• .Pre-pandemic modes of collaboration cannot be easily applied to a remote or hybrid work construct and must be carefully designed.
• Technology is a key enabler of collaboration but must be supported by an adaptive culture with well-defined and disciplined ways of working and rituals.