It’s no surprise that collaboration is key to driving innovation and organizational success. Done well collaboration can break down silos, spur innovation, and spark new product designs. Done poorly it can turn into nothing more than a time suck leading to overwork and employee burnout.
Harvard Business Review reports that employees spend 50% more of their workday in collaborative activities than they did 20 years ago. Additionally, it’s estimated the distribution of collaborative work is often lopsided with only 3% to 5% of employees driving 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations.1 This lopsidedness shows up in another HBR survey of senior managers who indicated that 71% of the meetings they attend are inefficient and unproductive. This data makes evident that workplace collaboration, while used extensively, is not being optimized to drive both innovation and employee engagement.
Follow these tips to ensure your collaborative efforts are both efficient and effective.
- Have a clear goal – Know exactly what your takeaways need to be when the meeting ends. Not knowing the needed outcome will allow the meeting to potentially spin out of control and waste every one’s time. This holds true for both one-time meetings as well as recurring meetings.
- Provide background and context – Ensure your colleagues are up-to-speed on background and contextual developments by sharing relevant information prior to the meeting. It’s ideal to share appropriate information 48 hours prior to the meeting to give everyone enough time to review the materials.
- Set participant expectations – Each person invited to your meeting needs to be an integral part in the success of the meeting topic. Do not invite people to meetings that do not need to be there. If a recap email after the meeting would suffice then that person doesn’t need to be invited to the meeting. Once you have your must-have list of participants be very open and transparent as to what their role will need to be in the meeting.
- Stay focused – Ensure colleagues stay on task and don’t derail your meeting by preparing a detailed agenda as well as creating a parking lot you can actively place off-topic issues for discussion later.
- Take advantage of technology – There is an abundance of tech available to enhance a collaborative experience from online conversation tools like Slack and Basecamp to video conferencing options that can bring teams together from all over the world. Mersive’s Solstice enhances in-room content sharing by allowing an unlimited number of users to easily stream device screens, share videos, and view web content at the same time – allowing participants to be actively engaged in the entire collaboration process.
While collaboration is key to getting ahead in a competitive market, only quality collaboration that engages employees and enhances content sharing will produce innovation as well as maintain high employee satisfaction.
About Us: Mersive unleashes the power of ideas through the world’s first truly multi-user wireless media streaming and collaboration solution. Content sharing should be at the heart of every meeting experience and our flagship software tool, Solstice, delivers an easy platform that enables multiple users to share content from computers, tablets, and phones to any meeting room display – securely and easily.
