Team collaboration in the workplace is a process where employees work together to achieve common goals. It typically involves sharing information and resources and working together to complete tasks or projects. This, of course, might sound like a given in any business environment. However, not all employees are fond of this, especially if the environment doesn't promote it.

So, if you want to ensure your team is collaborating with one another for maximum results, what can you do to promote it in the first place? Well, let's talk about that! But first, let's see what effective team collaboration looks like:

What Are the Benefits of Effective Team Collaboration?

What does effective team collaboration look like? You can tell if you notice the following benefits:

1. Increased creativity and productivity

When people work together, they can share ideas and build on each other's thoughts to come up with new and better ideas. This can lead to increased creativity and productivity.

2. Improved communication

Collaboration can help improve communication between team members. When people are working together towards a common goal, they need to communicate effectively in order to coordinate their efforts.

3. Greater motivation

Collaborating with others can help increase motivation as people feel like they are part of a team and are working towards a common goal.

4. Enhanced problem-solving

Working together can also help team members to come up with better solutions to problems. By pooling their knowledge and skills, they can often find better ways to solve problems than they could on their own.

5. Improved decision-making

When team members collaborate, they can share information and perspectives, which can lead to better decision-making.

How Do I Promote Team Collaboration in My Business?

As the owner or manager of a business, you know that team collaboration is essential to the success of your company. But what are some specific ways that you can promote team collaboration in your business? Here are a few ideas:

1. Encourage Open Communication

Make sure that your team members feel comfortable communicating with each other and that they understand that open communication is essential to the success of the team.

2. Facilitate Team Bonding

Encourage your team members to get to know each other on a personal level. This can be done through team-building activities, social events, or simply by creating an open and friendly work environment.

3. Encourage Creativity

Encourage your team members to think outside the box and come up with new and innovative ideas. This will help to promote a more collaborative environment.

4. Encourage Feedback

Make sure that your team members feel comfortable giving and receiving feedback. This will help to improve communication and collaboration within the team.

5. Encourage Conflict Resolution

Help your team members to resolve conflicts in a constructive and positive manner. This will help to promote a more collaborative environment.

By following these tips, you can encourage team collaboration in your business and help your team to be more successful.

Conclusion

As you can see, team collaboration is so important, and with all the benefits that it offers, you definitely do not want to miss out on it. So, follow the tips we've shared today to promote team collaboration in your business. Soon enough, you will get to enjoy more productive teams that not only help you achieve your business goals better but are happy in putting their time and effort for you!

Tandem offers an easy-to-use and effective platform in which teams can easily communicate with one another to resolve issues, share information, and so much more! If you are looking for an office chat program to promote collaboration, check out our platform today!

Rajiv is the co-founder and CEO of Tandem, a virtual office for hybrid and remote teams.

What did you do yesterday? What do you plan to do today? What’s standing in your way?

A grounding ritual.

Standup meetings are quick, daily check-ins (traditionally done standing in a circle) that enable small, collaborative teams to coordinate. At Tandem, our 15 minute standups help us stay on track, bubble up issues or questions, and offer a daily human touch-point.

Ideally, standup meetings accomplish 3 things:

• Gain a clear understanding of what your team is working on.
• Identify gaps or any roadblocks.
• Have a human moment together. (And this one is particularly important.)

After a lot of trial and error, our team at Tandem came up with a unique way to run daily standups. The process we follow helps us coordinate and advance on our individual projects, but also get to know each other and work better as a team. So here’s our 5-step guide to hosting the perfect standup meeting:

1. Collect your thoughts before you meet.

Your standup meeting should be a mix of async and synchronous communication. Before you hop on a call or meet in-person, take some time to write down a few bullet points that summarize what’s on your plate and anything worth sharing. Our team uses a #standup Slack channel, where we all add our notes before we get together.

This does a few things: It helps you to start your day with some light planning, and it turns your standup call into an opportunity to communicate and coordinate, instead of an overview of everyone’s to-do list.

2. Read silently together.

Now that everyone shared their notes in advance, you want to take some time to go through them. We kick off our standup with a 3 minute timer, and mute everyone - sometimes playing background jams with our music widget. We then go through our slack channel to understand what everyone is working on, and where we can contribute.

This brief writing and reading exercise allows people to quickly absorb information in parallel and connect the dots with their teammates.

3. Pass the mic.

Once our timer widget dings, we use our standup widget to get a randomized list of all the call participants. This helps us kick off the discussion and gives everyone a chance to ask a clarifying question, share something personal or simply say hello.

The goal here isn’t to repeat what you already posted in your slack channel, but rather to communicate and coordinate in real time - some things are just easier to discuss during a call  instead of waiting for an email reply.

4. Don’t deep dive - parking lot instead.

As we’re going through our daily updates, we often find out that some topics deserve a deeper dive - we call these our “parking lot items”.

We add these items to our handy agenda widget, and get back to them at the end of the call or create quick meetings to go through them in more details. This helps us stay on track and avoid boring other team members with overly complicated conversations.

5. Don’t forget to end!

You’d think that this last step is obvious, but officially calling an end to standup is important. So once everyone has had a chance to speak, we announce that the “Standup is over!”. If you have a parking lot item you want to discuss, you can stay on the call and go through it with your teammates. If not, you’re welcome to hang out and co-work, or go on with your day!

And for parking lot items, love the speed of using crosstalk for multiple conversations. Simply click on 👤 button.

The human touch.

Even though the main goal of the standup meeting is coordination, it’s important to create space for human moments, and doing a mix of written and live standup achieves this. Sometimes, we just want to check on our co-worker’s puppy or talk about our cool weekend plans, and that’s great!

These discussions happen all the time in the office, but when we transitioned to remote and hybrid work, every meeting became hyper focused on getting things done. And even though you might feel like that boosts your productivity, it can also negatively impact your team.

There’s a reason why small talk makes up over a third of all adult human speech. Research has shown that water cooler chats at the office can lead to higher positive emotions - friendly feelings, gratitude, pride, camaraderie. And these positive emotions tend to energize you, make you feel like you’re part of a team, and give you that little extra boost you need to dive into the task you’ve been avoiding for a week.

In a hybrid and remote workplace setting where every interaction is planned, these random run-ins and energy boosts are noticeably absent. And when you take away these genuine moments of connection, your team’s morale, synergy, and ability to collaborate all take a hit. Simply put - it makes you feel like you’re working with strangers you know nothing about on a mandatory group project. So I encourage you to purposefully drift away from your project review on your next call. Share something you’ve recently done that you are excited about, or chat about the latest Netflix show. You’ll be pleasantly surprised with how many things you have in common with your team.

I hope these tips and tricks help you take your standup meetings to the next level. If you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions you’d like to share, let’s chat!

@rajivayyangar | rajiv@tandem.chat

Rym is Head of Marketing at Tandem, a virtual office for remote and hybrid teams.

It takes the average person 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on track after they join a meeting. When you pair that up with the amount of meetings we have to attend, now that we are all hybrid and remote, the hidden costs can quickly add up. Meetings should enable you to get your work done, not get in the way of it. Yet, how many times have you heard (or thought) “This meeting could’ve been an email”?

After sitting in front for our laptops for the best part of the last two years, there’s one thing we can all agree on: virtual meetings can get exhausting. And there’s a few reasons why:

• You aren’t needed on a meeting or you lack context and structure. Most remote and hybrid workers reported that one of their biggest pain points is having too many meetings that aren’t productive or an effective use of their time.
• You’re missing non-verbal cues. A big part of our daily communication is non-verbal. Think head nods, facial expressions, posture, gestures, tone and pitch of voice. When we have meetings in-person, you automatically absorb these while listening to the speaker. However, in a video call, you work harder to catch and process all the non-verbal cues, and that gets emotionally taxing.
• Your team isn’t engaged. Gallup’s recent State of the Global Workplace report has shown that (yet again) 80% of employees are not engaged in the workplace, and it shows, because 20% of workers are frustrated by disengaged coworkers during virtual meetings.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg. Additional reasons include technical difficulties, external distractions, lack of psychological trust, weak company culture, and lack of non-work related social interactions.

In summary: There has to be a better way.

6 Tips to Make Your Virtual Meetings More Meaningful

With the world transitioning to hybrid workplaces structures, virtual meetings (and hybrid meetings) are here to stay. So how can we make them a more enjoyable experience for hosts and participants alike? Here are a few tips:

Tip 1: Should this be a meeting?

First step is asking yourself if the topic or question you need answered deserves a meeting. Can it be a slack message? Can it be an email? Can you wave at someone on Tandem instead of putting something on the calendar?

A Dialpad survey has recently shown that 37% of U.S. employees spend between 4 and 12 hours a week in meetings. Going back to what we discussed earlier, we should enable work instead of hindering it, and meetings take away from precious deep focus time.

A good indication that you need to schedule a meeting is if all of these statements apply:

• A topic needs to be discussed.
• The topic requires input from other team members.
• You require input from more than one person.
• All the parties involved need to discuss the topic at the same time.

If one of these doesn’t apply, then you probably don’t need that meeting in the first place and should opt for a direct message and a 10 minutes chat.

Tip 2: Only include the people that are needed.

How many people are too many people in a virtual meeting? It depends on a few things, but mainly the type of meeting and size of your company.

A smaller meeting is best to decide or accomplish something quickly, a medium-sized meeting is ideal to brainstorm and get a few additional perspectives; and if the goal is to announce something or rally the troops, you can go large. If you’re part of a big company, this HBR article suggests following the 8-18-1800 rule as a rough guideline:

• If you have to solve a problem or make a decision, limit your meetings to 8 people. Beyond that, you will receive so much conflicting input that it will become difficult to solve the problem or agree on a final decision.
• If you want to brainstorm, you can go as high as 18 participants.
• If everyone will be providing updates, limit the number of participants to 18, otherwise, your meeting will last forever.
• If you’re having an All Hands Meeting, a Town Hall, or 1-5 people are providing company-wide updates, invite however many people need to be there, that can be 1,800 — or more!

At Tandem, we limit our meetings to the team members that need to be there, but we have a rule that all of them are open to listeners. To limit disruption, if a person wasn’t included in the initial invite but wants to join, they use the “listening” feature on Tandem. This allows you to hear what’s going on in the meeting, but remain on mute and off video.

Tip 3: Provide as much context as possible.

As the meeting host, your goal should always be to make the meeting productive and valuable for everyone involved. Providing context for the discussion prior to the meeting can help the participants understand what’s expected of them, the different rules of engagement, and the outcome you want to reach. A few ways you can do that is by providing an agenda, introducing the topic in an email, or sharing a document you plan to go through in advance to turn your call into a discussion and an opportunity for feedback instead of initial discovery and context-setting.

Tip 4: Keep it engaging.

There is nothing more soul crushing than joining a meeting that turns into an endless monologue. The reason why a meeting gets scheduled is to get additional input. Yet, more often than not, virtual (and in-person) meetings are one-sided, or end up dominated by 2-3 loud voices. Justin Hale and Joseph Grenny, of VitalSmarts, came up with a few virtual meeting rules that are proven to increase virtual meeting engagement. In a recent study they conducted, that included 15,000+ participants, 86% of the attendees reported high or higher levels of engagement in their virtual meetings when all 5 of these rules were applied:

1. The 60-seconds rule: Never engage with a group in solving a problem or discussing a topic, until they truly understand it. In the first 60 seconds of your meeting, do something to help them experience it. Share provocative statistics, anecdotes, or get them to try something.
2. The responsibility rule: Participants often make the implicit decision to act as an observer, when they didn’t call the meeting themselves. To counter act that, it is essential to create an experience of shared responsibility early on in the meeting, and it isn’t enough to just state that they need to take responsibility at the beginning of the call. Which leads us to the next rule.
3. The nowhere to hide rule: If everyone is responsible, then no one feels responsible. You can avoid this in virtual meetings by giving people tasks they can actively engage in, so there is nowhere to hide. An example of that is creating a random order of people to provide updates during your daily standup or by assigning people to groups of two or three to brainstorm solutions (Try /random or Crosstalk on your next Tandem call!)
4. The MVP rule: The minimum viable powerpoint (or document). It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the group is, if you want your audience to be engaged, select the least amount of data you need to inform the group and trigger a discussion. Not a single slide more.
5. The 5-minute rule: Don’t ever go longer than 5 minutes without giving the group another problem to solve. If you don’t sustain a continual expectation of meaningful involvement, participants tend to retreat in that alluring observer role. And engagement doesn’t always have to mean active discussion, it can also take the form of gamification, or a simple poll to take the pulse mid-meeting.

Tip 5: Respect everyone’s working hours.

It’s not just you, remote and hybrid employees are working longer than ever before. A working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that during the pandemic, the average workday length increase by 48.5 minutes and the number of meetings increased by 13% .

While remote and hybrid workplace structures allow for greater flexibility, they also make it very hard to disconnect at the end of the day, and for a reason. It is hard to set boundaries between work and home life when your office is also your living room or your bedroom. Checking your email one last time, replying to a quick slack message, or returning a call after work hours become habits that are hard to shake off, even though they’re essential to really unwind. To tie it back to your virtual meetings, you’re more likely to get active (and voluntary) participation and a productive discussion when you respect everyone’s working hours (9-5, 8-4, or whatever the breakdown is at your current company). A few ways we’ve tried to solve the problem with Tandem is by displaying the status of every teammate (so you can see who’s active, who’s away, and who’s offline) and by adding a “Do Not Disturb” function that you can automatically set to show you as unavailable after 5pm, for example.

Tip 6: Try water cooler chats instead!

Do you ever miss the feeling of walking to someone’s desk at the office and asking them a quick question? We do too. The most productive conversations don’t always happen in a scheduled meeting with 10 participants, sometimes they’re a simple 2 minutes chat with your co-worker. When the world went on lockdown, we instantly lost these magic moments that help us network and get our work done faster, and communication or information sharing became a roadblock to getting your work done. And that’s exactly the problem we are solving with Tandem.