Importance of Collaboration in the Workplace-Samples for Students

Question: Discuss about the Trends in the Global Business Environment. Answer: Introduction The biggest factor, which contributes towards the success of businesses is that whether or not their employees are working together as a team. Hence, it is very vital to encourage collaboration in the work place. Many leaders are well aware of the dangers of collaborative overload in the workplace. This report describes a brief summary on the importance of Collaboration and the effect of Collaborative overload. What are the three types of resources that create value through collaboration? What are the finite resources? What is the work of a leader? What is the main reason behind employee resigning from the job? These are the four key questions that have been raised from the article and will be answered in the discussion below. Discussions Importance of collaboration in the work place Collaboration refers to working together of two or more individuals in a group for achieving a common target or goral by sharing their knowledge, skills and ideas (Sinha et al. 2015). It can take place in virtual as we as traditional teams. It helps in providing value. Working together always inspires the team members and it injects a strong sense of purpose as well. Collaboration helps the team members or colleagues to join on one common platform and allows them work together to achieve their common goal by brainstorming, thinking and by delivering wide range of perspectives in order to provide a better solution (Chandra, Iyer and Raman 2015). It also provides equal opportunities to each team member for participating and communicating their knowledge and ideas. Impact of collaboration in a work place Business has become immensely cross functional and global. Therefore, collaboration in the workplace has become vital in order to lead the business towards success. When a team gets collaborated, they essentially learn new things from one another. A company then becomes a body that inspires a culture and society of continues learning. With the same, it supports the learning through various opportunities for further development. Whenever the team member collaborates, they intensify and enhance their potential and capacity to grow afar from their comfort zones, which in return, takes the business to a new height. In addition, collaboration makes people look at the bigger picture. Each individual is different from the other in some or the other sense. No one is same. So, when several people from several different backgrounds are there for there, working for an organization, the leader must know how to benefit those people and how they could complement one another. Even if the project ge ts failed or not meet to his desired expectations, that partnership can still attain a great deal. Collaborations in a work place also promote self-analysis (Day 2015). It challenges the team members to think, reveal and receive coherence about their own competencies. Collaboration serves as a reflector, which gives them a glance of their merit and demerits, strengths and weaknesses. Also, it helps in problem solving as well. When a large range of knowledge, ideas and skills are combined, they create a more competent and vast talent pool that are able and experienced at the same place. Virtual collaboration reduces and even eliminates the requirements for infrastructure and finance in a work place (Walker, Davis and Stevenson 2017). However, employees spend most of their time with their colleagues in meetings and responding to their queries. Hence, though collaboration is beneficial and is well documented, it comes with associated costs as well. It often go unrecognized. Too many de mands for collaboration in a work place with less number of employees leads to congestion in the workflow and results in employee burnout. Types of collaborative resources There are three types of value creating resources and they are informational, social and personal resources (Hajli 2014). It is very important to distinguish among these three types of collaborative resources. The informational resources are the knowledge and skills. They are the expertise that could be recorded as well as passed on. The social resources include a persons position, access and awareness in a network that helps the employees better collaborate with their colleagues in a work place. However, the personal resources include a persons own time and his energy (Yu 2014). With the same, there is also a key factor that differentiates these resources from each other. That is, the social and the informational resources could be shared without hampering the supply of the collaborator, whereas this is not the same in case of social resources because personal energy and time are finite resources. Impact of high demand for personal resources In most of the companies in recent days, there is a high demand of personal resources than the social and the informational resources. The amount of time that the employees and the managers spend on the collaborative work has increased over the past two decades. People spend almost 80% of their time responding or answering to their colleagues. Advantages of collaboration Combines talent and strengths- It enables all the team members in sharing their talents and finding the most powerful solutions to the problems (Ball 2014). When the team members collaborate with each other, they then get the opportunities to utilize the skills and knowledge of everyone who are involved in the team. Develops employee skills- Collaboration is beneficial both for the employees and the company (Sawyer 2017). When they work together, they interact with each other, share their perspectives, observe how other thinks, works, and operate. This in turn, helps the employees to develop their own skills by visualizing others. It gives them chance to grab some skills from their team mates and develop their strengths. This will not only help them in their corporate work but also they can practice these newly learned skills in their own fields and make further enhancements and improvements. Increases efficiency- Collaboration in a workplace helps thee businesses to complete vital projects and meet the crucial deadlines more efficiently (Sawyer 2017). Speeds up the solutions- Collaboration always speeds things up (Sawyer 2017) by fast tracking the progress. For example, it is a known fact that, a problem that takes huge time to get solved when it is handled by a particular individual but when a group of people takes the initiative to work on it, it gets easier and may get solved within a lesser time. There will be several expertises to get the problem solved and their viewpoints shall open up doors to numerous solutions and ideas that a single person may not be capable to produce. Enhances employee job satisfaction and retention- The employees are likely to work for tee companies when they have good and strong ties with their colleagues and people involved with them in the work place (Cullen et al. 2014). It makes them feel that they are a vital component of something important. Impact of collaborative overload Though collaboration is very important in a work place for varieties of reasons mentioned above by, it has few downsides too. Collaborative overload is the result of employees over reliance on meetings, e-mails, and other collaboration tools (Cross, Reble and Grant 2016). This has limited the ability of employees to get things done. Business is becoming more and more global day-by-day (Ferraro and Briody 2017) and therefore, the need of connecting with people has become more important than ever. People in most of the companies spend most of their time attending phone calls, and responding to the emails and meetings. Meeting is the most time consuming collaborative activities. This is hampering the culture of the companies in some or the other ways. The culture is not working when the company is layering on after other meetings as they have people piling knowledge. Role of leader in collaboration management in a work place Leaders are prime role models in very work place (Boekhorst 2015). They must therefore learn how to manage collaboration in their business place by mapping the supplies and demands and redistributing or eliminating work. He must also ensure to reward and incentivizing his employees for collaborating with each other more efficiently (Kowalski and Jenkins 2015). In order to encourage a collaborating environment in the work force, a leader must distribute the work responsibilities. This also enables to share their knowledge with each other. However, collaborative overload has also been identified in many companies and people are at high risks due to this. Hence, they should be helped by their leaders on learning how to filter the requests and say no to someone when their request does not credit their own involvement. In addition, the leader can also encourage the collaborators to devote their time more on coaching, training and monitoring. He can also make use of leveraging technologies for online discussions, encouraging face-to-face discussions and co-locating interdependent workers in order to decrease the load. Conclusion In current days, progressive companies are growingly realizing the worth of collaboration and they are searching for ways in order to promote it within their employees, both virtual and traditional. Hence, if a business person wants his business to grow and prosper and his workplace to turn into productive heroes, it is very important to promote a spirit of collaboration among them. The above analysis, has given a fair idea of what is meant by the term collaboration and its importance as well as the benefits of encouraging it among the employees. References: Ball, P., 2014. Strength in numbers.Nature,506(7489), p.422. Boekhorst, J.A., 2015. The role of authentic leadership in fostering workplace inclusion: A social information processing perspective.Human Resource Management,54(2), pp.241-264. Chandra, R., Iyer, R.S. and Raman, R., 2015. Enabling organizations to implement smarter, customized social computing platforms by leveraging knowledge flow patterns.Journal of Knowledge Management,19(1), pp.95-107. Cross, R., Rebele, R. and Grant, A., 2016. Collaborative overload.Harvard Business Review,94(1), pp.74-79. Cullen, K.L., Edwards, B.D., Casper, W.C. and Gue, K.R., 2014. Employees adaptability and perceptions of change-related uncertainty: Implications for perceived organizational support, job satisfaction, and performance.Journal of Business and Psychology,29(2), pp.269-280. Day, G.E., 2015. Successfully managing conflict.Leading and Managing Health Services: An Australasian Perspective, p.273. Ferraro, G.P. and Briody, E.K., 2017.The cultural dimension of global business. Taylor Francis. Hajli, M.N., 2014. The role of social support on relationship quality and social commerce.Technological Forecasting and Social Change,87, pp.17-27. Kowalski, A. and Jenkins, L., 2015. The role of bridging organizations in environmental management: examining social networks in working groups.Ecology and Society,20(2). Sawyer, K., 2017.Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. Basic Books. Sinha, V., Merchant, A., Dangar, N., Agal, P. and Sharma, P., 2015. Comparative Study on Workplace Collaboration across the Leading Global Organizations in IT Sector.International Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals (IJHCITP),6(2), pp.14-32. Walker, D.H., Davis, P.R. and Stevenson, A., 2017. Coping with uncertainty and ambiguity through team collaboration in infrastructure projects.International Journal of Project Management,35(2), pp.180-190. Yu, P., Lin, L., Wang, R., Wang, J. and Wang, F., 2014, August. A unified latent factor correction scheme for collaborative filtering. InFuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD), 2014 11th International Conference on(pp. 581-586). IEEE