According to collaboration statistics, 86% of top executives and employees think that poor communication or lack of communication is one of the main reasons behind workplace failures. 75% of executives consider collaboration and teamwork “very important” Vast majority (97%) of top executives and employees believes that lack of alignment among team members can negatively impact the outcome of tasks and projects.
More importantly, it can also improve employee satisfaction by 4-5 times, which is very useful especially in times of the Great Resignation. Organizations that leverage radical collaboration can get rid of hierarchical structures and the complexity associated with it. It accelerates innovation and provides employees with the autonomy they need to showcase their talents and skills.
In this article, you will learn about six proven strategies that will help you enhance radical collaboration.
How To Implement Radical Collaboration In Your Organization?
You might be wondering how an organization can adopt radical collaboration? Here are four key steps they need to take in order to achieve this goal.
-
Managerial devolution
Radical collaboration is not possible without devolution of power. It takes the power from managers and distributes it equally amongst all the employees. This also helps managers to see problems from an employee perspective and adapt quickly.
-
Team autonomy
The best thing about radical collaboration is that it helps every employee find meaning and fulfillment in their work. Every team has autonomy which means that they can make their own decisions such as buying cheap dedicated hosting or not. Best of all, everything is clearly defined from how to achieve the goals, what steps you need to take to achieve the goals to when you should take those steps.
-
Deficiency gratification
What really makes radical collaboration stand out is that it empowers teams to take bigger risks. When you take bigger risks, you are more likely to innovate. This means that you will be testing new ideas and putting them into practice much faster than your competitors.
-
Candid vulnerability
Want your employees to realize their potential? Radical collaboration can help you with that too.
6 Proven Strategies To Increase Radical Collaboration In Your Organization
Here are six effective strategies that will help you improve radical collaboration in your organization.
Pair Programming
One of the best ways to improve radical collaboration in your team is to break a large team into multiple smaller teams of two members. Ask them to collaborate on a project or task while sharing the same machine to achieve the goal. In a pair programming environment, two developers use the same computer or cheap dedicated server hosting and transfer the keyboard from one to another while writing code. This exercise comes in handy when it comes to breaking the silos. It helps every employee make contributions and share their knowledge and expertise while helping organizations grow.
Holacratic Governance
If you are one of those who want to completely transform your organization’s structure, you should definitely establish a holacratic governance system in your organization. It is basically a process that will help the organization bring continuous improvement throughout the entire organization.
It empowers all the employees of the organization irrespective of their ranks. As a result, anyone can raise an issue anytime. One of the biggest benefits of this is that it allows businesses to resolve issues faster. It also eliminates any ambiguity surrounding different roles in your organization and minimizes the risk of team dysfunction.
Deming Pay System
W-Edward Deming, who is also known as the father of lean manufacturing, proposed a pay system called the Deming pay system. The primary purpose of this pays system is to replace the biased compensation system present in traditional organizations that still adopts a hierarchical model. It ensures that anyone in your organization no matter what their rank might be will receive a transparent salary. Employees will get a pay raise through a transparent process every year. Even the dividends and profit-sharing is done equally. One of the biggest advantages of this payment system is that it creates equality in your organization.
Balance Scores
If you prefer a points system and evaluate everything based on that then a balance score might be a perfect strategy. Balance scores help you rate things on a scale of one to ten. Whether it is asking your employees to rate their work-life balance or their mental well being or engagement at work.
With balanced scores, you can easily evaluate where you stand currently and where you need to go. It can also help you link individual employees to the company’s goals and facilitate communication. Additionally, it can streamline your business strategy. You need to keep it as simple as possible as sometimes it can get very complicated.
Thinking vs Saying Exercise
Create a two-column on a blank piece of paper and start jotting down your thoughts on one side and what’s discussed in the meeting. This two-column thinking vs saying exercise can come in handy especially when you had a tough conversation at work.
This will help you visualize ideas that lie at the intersection of both columns. You can either call it defensive reasoning or use it to oppose candid vulnerability. When you are writing the ideas that you could not convey during the meeting, you could find new ideas that the other business leaders or top executives might have never thought of.
Outcome Team Paradigm
Outcome-centric teams are usually focused on delivering value to their users and they are usually cross-functional in nature. You will find team members from all the functional units in such teams. In their quest to deliver value to users, they can even modify and tweak entire codebases if they have to and deploy them on VPS Server.
They might not look at who created it and who is responsible for maintaining and managing those codebases. If you are building an outcome-focused team, you need to develop an organizational culture to facilitate that otherwise, they could not succeed or help you with radical collaboration.
Do you use radical collaboration in your organization? Which strategies do you use to increase its effectiveness? Share it with us in the comments section below.