Cultivate Collaboration: How HR Can Unlock Personal And Organizational Health

Workplace collaboration is more than just a buzzword

Organizations of all shapes and sizes celebrate collaboration as a value, a skill, and a way of working. CEOs deem collaboration a company-wide north star. Leadership teams include it on the list of company values. People leaders mention it liberally when recruiting and onboarding new employees. 

Yet, despite these surface-level enthusiasms for workplace collaboration, many organizations fail to invest in helping their people develop and sustain deep collaborations.  

According to data from my Workplace Collaboration Survey, 31% of full-time workers in the United States said they had received no professional development in how to build healthy collaborative relationships in the workplace.

This oversight has real consequences for the well-being of individuals, as well as the health of the organization. 

People who receive more professional development in how to nurture healthy workplace collaborations report higher job satisfaction than people who don’t receive that upskilling. They also feel more positively about collaboration in general and are eager to spend a higher proportion of their work lives engaged in collaboration. 

Moreover, companies and individuals alike benefit when their workplace relationships are positive.  The Workplace Collaboration Survey, for instance, showed that people who feel positively about their collaborators report higher job satisfaction, lower anxiety, and lower depression. Recent data from Gallup showed that having a best friend at work predicts favorable business outcomes including profitability and low turnover. 

So here’s the tension: Companies ostensibly value collaboration, and data suggest there are loads of benefits to individuals and companies alike when collaborations thrive. Yet, a lot of companies invest very little in helping their people develop satisfying and productive collaborations, instead relegating collaboration to the realm of empty corporate buzzwords.

What Does This Reality Mean for HR Leaders? 

It means that HR leaders have an opportunity to simultaneously serve their people and their organizations by cultivating collaborative capacity across the organization.  

Here are three principles for doing so.

Hire and develop collaborative people. HR leaders are well-equipped to help organizations get into place a key element of the collaboration ecosystem: collaborative people. Beyond merely mentioning that your organization seeks a great collaborator with strong interpersonal skills, look for clear evidence of those skills in the application documents and interview. When a candidate describes a complex project in a previous role, is it clear that others were involved and celebrated? Do you hear plural pronouns in addition to “I, I, I”?

In addition, provide solid professional development offerings on key collaboration skills such as communication, time management, and basic project management.  Advocate for more intensive, one-on-one support, such as coaching, for individuals carrying heavy baggage around past collaborations that soured or former collaborators who shattered their trust. Support their efforts to amend anti-collaborative mindsets and dispositions.

Encourage collaborative relationships. Next, help the people in your organization develop and maintain healthy collaborative relationships with each other. The best collaborative relationships are those in which relationship quality and interdependence are both high. Offer professional development in relationship building. Help managers and directors think through how best to structure, measure, and reward work to support–rather than undercut–the health of the relationships among members of the team.

Offer team-based coaching to help groups navigate tough spots and leverage once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Offer workshops to help collaborators determine the health of their collaboration and to carve a path for continued improvement. 

Spearhead collaborative culture. If your organization wants to see more collaboration, then collaboration must be possible, easy, normative, rewarding, and – sometimes – even required.  HR leaders have a hand on each of these critical levers.

Advocate for easy-to-find, and easy-to-use, directories that enable people in one part of the company to find and contact people in other parts. Champion the value of shared information systems to help people move information into and out of workgroups. Elevate stories of everyday collaboration on community boards, in newsletters, and in celebrations. Insist on review and promotion practices that incentivize skilled collaborators. Exit people who demonstrate a persistent inability to play well with others.

The bottom line. Enhancing collaborative capacity is a key that HR leaders can turn to unlock simultaneously the well-being of their people and the health of their organizations. Investing in this capacity now will help individuals, teams, and organizations adapt as the nature of work continues to shift and as companies of all shapes and sizes continue to innovate and redesign the way work is done. 

Dr Deb Mashek helps business leaders build better collaborations. An experienced business advisor, professor, and nonprofit executive, her writing appears in MIT-Sloan Management Review, The Hechinger Report, Fortune, and Psychology Today. Deb has been an invited speaker on collaboration and viewpoint diversity at leading organizations including the United Nations and the American Psychological Association.  Visit www.collaborhate.com