We all know what collaboration is, right?
Humans collaborate all the time in life, from planning with friends which movie to see at the cinema, through to organising who’s going to do which task in a project team at work. Collaboration, according to the dictionary, is the process of two or more people working together towards shared goals.
But why should we care about collaboration though?
Collaboration is crucial at work – you’ve probably all met those people in life who aren’t “team players” and won’t share, cooperate or show up – frustrating, right? Collaborating with colleagues allows us to:
• Generate more, diverse ideas
• Divide and conquer work by sharing it out
• Pool our strengths and talents to help get a job done
• Gives us a sense of belonging through team spirit
• Learn from each other
As teams and organisations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay in sync. If we are all pulling in different directions, reaching goals becomes pretty tricky.
We’re a global company communicating over multiple time zones and cultures, and we’re going through a challenging and exciting time. Communication is more important than ever. Coupled with this, we have a real opportunity to look at the ways we currently work and see if there is room for improvement.
What’s a collaboration tool anyway?
“Workers now spend up to 30% of their time interacting with dozens of internal systems, knowledge repositories, and reporting apps. Wrestling with cumbersome systems consumes too much human talent.” ~ Forrester 2018
Collaboration tools are specially designed software which help employees work together to meet shared goals. They can have many capabilities but in ETS we see those separating roughly into three buckets: Calling, Storing, and Sharing/Discussing.
We know other organisations are doing some really exciting things in this space, like GSK making Workplace by Facebook their primary communication channel to all 120,000 FTE and contract workers, or Zipcar crowdsourcing ways to give back to the community via Slack!
According to a report published by McKinsey improving internal collaboration through social tools could help raise productivity as much as 20-25%. ETS want to bring some of that productivity to the new Elanco!
We’re preparing to pilot a number of different technologies in the collaboration space. These are:
• Zoom
• Microsoft Teams
• Workplace
• Slack
Our pilots will include employees from different business areas to give us some good sample data – if you have any teams in mind, or would like to be involved in the pilot, please feel free to contact me. We’re currently still working with the SERF team but anticipate the pilots will start early in the new year.
We know the current landscape is really complicated in this space, with multiple different tools and rules, making it hard to know what tool to use and when. Not to mention not knowing where is best to go to find the information you’re looking for! ETS want to make this easier moving forward, so that employees can spend time doing things which add value, rather than searching and clicking endless links or fighting technology which behaves badly! We’re aiming for less tools, with better capabilities, and simpler positioning to help the new Elanco work together to be the best it can be!
Jo Joss
ETS Engagement Lead