subject: How Collaboration Consulting Can Improve Productivity And Morale. [print this page] Individualism is a growing tendency in the Western world. We even have the expression "the rat rate" to describe how things work in our corporate environment. This can be a good thing when it encourages everyone to do his best and be productive at all times. It can be a very bad thing when every employee in your business starts acting as a unit and looks at everyone else not as fellow team members, but as threats to his career opportunities. Then the business stops functioning as a unit. Employees are no longer complementing each other, but competing against each other. This is when you have to call in a collaboration consulting company.
What they will do is to analyze the different business units in your company and the way they work together to ensure that they are operating at optimum levels. The same goes for individual workers. Someone might be an excellent worker, but if he is unable or unwilling to operate as a member of a team, he can have a negative effect on the productivity of his whole department.
A failing to collaborate between and within departments is very often a leadership failure. That's why the consulting company will look at the way leadership operates first. Managers don't always realize how closely their actions are watched by the people working for them. If managers demonstrate a culture of individualism and in-fighting and not one of working together for the good of the company, this philosophy will filter down right to the cleaning staff and have a very bad effect on company morale and productivity.
Next to be studied will be the heads of business units, such as finance, marketing et cetera. Very often problems start here. If you have managers who are totally unable or unwilling to delegate tasks, people who feel they have to do all the 'important' work themselves, it will have two effects: Firstly the workers will become extremely frustrated because they feel they are not given scope to develop in their careers and secondly management will forever be highly stressed and too busy to attend to what they had to do in the first place: manage.
After studying the way your company and its employees operate, the collaboration consultants will come forward with a set of proposals. Often this entails that you assign the job of collaboration coordinator to a specific employee and that he in turn puts together a team of people whose job it is to foster the culture of collaboration in the company.
Expect resistance from your employees against this. They have done things a certain way for a long time - their attitudes will take some time to change. This can best be brought about by explaining the benefits of working together to your staff and to have regular meetings where workers can suggest better ways of working together to management.
Collaboration consulting is a concept that has existed for quite some time. In the current economic situation it has acquired new relevance. A business simply can no longer afford to operate as a group of virtually unrelated departments and individuals each with an own agenda. Collaboration is no longer a luxury - it is a necessity to survive.
