8 benefits of collaboration in the workplace

76% of workers say they enjoy working collaboratively. But workplace collaboration isn’t just good for team members. It’s also good for your organization.

That’s because, when your teams are pulling in the same direction, there’s less wasted effort, greater productivity, and better business results.

These days, collaboration is a little more complicated than it used to be. Many employees work remotely or on a hybrid schedule. There are also hard-to-reach frontline employees to consider.

In 2024, organizations are having to be more intentional about employee collaboration — and they’re turning to tech tools to bring dispersed teams together.

Collaboration in the workplace may be changing. But it’s still as important as ever. Here, we take a look at the benefits of workplace collaboration, along with the role tech can play in creating a collaborative ecosystem.  

What does collaboration look like in the workplace?

Workplace collaboration involves team members working together to achieve a common goal. It relies on empathy, active listening, conflict resolution, and accountability.

But it’s not just about team members working together on a big project. Or giving the standard monthly update on company developments. Collaboration is much, much more than that.

The most collaborative organizations make collaboration part of their company culture. It’s a mindset of openness and transparency. A place where all employees engage in effective communication and are ready and willing to help one another.

Employee collaboration might mean liaising with engineering, marketing, and sales teams to launch a ground-breaking new product. Or simply helping your co-worker get the photocopier working again.

In any form, collaboration is about sharing information and knowledge. About willingly offering support. And about combining employee strengths to get the best results each and every day.

Nowadays, there’s another key element to collaboration in the workplace — technology. In the wake of remote working and higher employee expectations with regard to tech, collaboration has gone digital.

Organizations use digital tools to facilitate employee collaboration even when teams don’t work face-to-face. They use tech, like project management software, employee apps, and real-time communication tools.

This is helping to maintain collaboration among desk-based teams, at home and in the office. It’s also supporting dispersed frontline workers to collaborate at work, too.  

The Blink employee app helps frontline and desk-based employees work better together. Take a look at our platform features to find out more.

Why is workplace collaboration important?

Collaboration is good for business. It ensures that your employees, like cogs in a well-oiled machine, are all working together. There’s more momentum and less friction. So you find it easier to achieve organizational goals.

Collaboration within teams helps those teams to function more effectively. Cross-functional collaboration is important too. Team-working across different departments helps to remove workplace silos and get all teams on the same page.

Workplace collaboration is also good for employee motivation and morale.

With easy and effective communication, the workplace becomes a happier place to be. And when employees operate as a team, helping each other to achieve tasks, the workplace becomes more caring and supportive.

Collaboration clearly makes a difference to employees. A 2022 Corel report into team-working revealed that:

• 41% of employees have left their job or would consider leaving their job due to poor collaboration at work
• 64% of employees say that poor collaboration costs them at least three hours per week in productivity
• 78% of employees say that leadership could be doing more to promote collaboration within the organization

Collaboration ties in with employee engagement, the employee experience, productivity, and employee retention, making it a really crucial component of any workplace. 

8 benefits of collaboration in the workplace

Let’s take a closer look at what workplace collaboration can do for your employees and organization. Here’s what you can expect when your employees routinely collaborate with one another. 

Improved employee engagement

Employees who feel they belong within an organization are 5.3 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work. And employees who get enough information to do their job well are 2.8 times more likely to be engaged. 

Workplace collaboration brings employees together. It gives them need-to-know information, and aligns everyone behind company goals. 

This creates a sense of community and purpose, which fuels employee engagement. Collaboration leads employees to feel more satisfied in their work and more loyal to your company.   

Increased efficiency

When teams collaborate, they share information. Teams pool resources and people power. Employees who work together closely can share workloads and responsibilities.This enables teams to complete tasks more quickly. It also reduces the chance of duplicated work.

This efficiency frees up time in the workday. It helps managers to make workloads more manageable, while creating the time and employee headspace for even more creativity and collaboration.

Knowledge sharing

Imagine a company that fails to share its collective knowledge effectively.

Teams spend their time researching topics that other teams understand in depth. Employees repeat the same mistakes because there’s no one sharing their hard-earned insights. You fail to establish best practices. And employees are in a constant state of catch-up.

Now imagine the opposite. A company where knowledge is shared seamlessly between co-workers, teams, and departments. There’s no gatekeeper and collective knowledge is easy for everyone to access.

The latter scenario makes for a more successful organization. It helps you build a more knowledgeable workforce. And it saves a heap of time — because your people aren’t separately pursuing the same lines of research.  

Stronger relationships

Good employee collaboration relies on strong workplace relationships. And it helps to develop them, too.

When teams collaborate, they communicate regularly. They work together towards a shared goal. They also develop trust and mutual respect as they share ideas and rely on each other’s support.

By developing these strong relationships, your organization gets better at collaboration going forward. You create a culture of psychological safety, where people feel comfortable speaking up about their ideas, mistakes, and concerns.  

Strong workplace connections also improve the employee experience. With Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report revealing that 20% of employees experience a lot of loneliness at work, nurturing workplace relationships has never been more important.

Better decision-making

When you make decisions as part of a team, you leverage the knowledge, perspective, and experience of each team member. You involve the people who are directly affected by the decision — and those who are responsible for implementing it.

Making decisions as part of a team means assumptions are challenged and everyone has a sense of buy-in. You make informed and balanced decisions that are more likely to garner company-wide support.

For example, in a recent webinar, we heard from the team at the Capital District Transport Authority (CDTA) in New York. They realized they needed new tech to improve internal communication at the organization.

When deciding on the right tech solution, they took a cross-functional approach. They involved communications, IT, and HR teams, along with leadership. They also consulted the workers who’d be using the new tech.

By collaborating in this way, the CDTA was able to choose a modern intranet that met everyone’s needs and enjoyed excellent levels of adoption.

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Enhanced problem-solving

We all know the proverb. “Two heads are better than one.” And when it comes to problem-solving, you’re much more likely to come up with creative and effective solutions when working as part of a team.

Collaboration brings people with different viewpoints together. This diversity helps teams to approach a problem from multiple angles — and come up with a variety of potential solutions.

It also minimizes blind spots. Because there are people with lots of different perspectives involved, it’s less likely that some element of the problem or its solution is overlooked.

Stronger employee development

The practice of collaboration helps to develop employee soft skills, like decision-making, problem-solving, communication, conflict resolution, and creative thinking

When you have a culture of knowledge sharing, co-workers can also learn from one another. They can pick up new skills and information from the people they work with. Employees are organically coached by more experienced members of the team.

This informal learning can take place within teams and across departments. Successful cross-departmental collaboration enables workers to get a better understanding of different areas of the business.

Boosted productivity

As we’ve already seen, good teamwork is linked to:

• Improved employee engagement
• Knowledge sharing and employee development
• Increased efficiency
• Stronger relationships and communication

All of these things support workplace productivity. Employees have access to the resources, skills, knowledge, and relationships that help them perform at their best.

Collaboration also improves accountability. When employees are involved in planning, decision-making, and problem-solving, they’re more motivated to work hard and make a success of the initiative or project.

The role of technology in workplace collaboration

It used to be that collaboration could take place informally in the office.

Co-workers could share ideas as they made coffee in the break room. Or as they walked to the elevator together. There were plenty of face-to-face meetings where people could work together to solve problems and make decisions.

But things have changed. In recent years, technology has played a much bigger role in team working.  

Firstly, thanks to the pandemic, remote working became much more widespread. While some organizations are encouraging people back to the office, a sizable proportion of employees still spend part of their working week working remotely.

In the UK, figures for 2024 show that 40% of workers spend at least some time working from home. In the US, 41% of employees whose jobs can be done remotely work a hybrid schedule.

Secondly, employee expectations around workplace tech have increased. With intuitive tech at home making life easier and more convenient, employees now expect the same digital experiences in the workplace. This goes for frontline employees, too.

Frontline employees — working shifts, in isolation, or on a busy shop floor — haven’t always had the same opportunities for teamwork as their desk-based peers. But with organizations now focusing on frontline employee engagement and retention, this is something that employers are looking to rectify.

To involve all employees in workplace collaboration — no matter their location or schedules — we have to be intentional. We also have to use the right technology.

Here are a few tools that support collaboration in the modern, digital workplace.  

Real-time communication tools

When teams are working away from the office, real-time communication tools are an employee collaboration essential. You need a way for co-workers to communicate seamlessly, sharing information as if face to face.

We know that many deskless workers conduct conversations on personal apps. But this type of shadow IT poses security risks. It also fails to enhance collaboration and employee engagement as successfully as a dedicated communication tool, run with the oversight of your managers.

So providing employees with messaging and video conferencing tools is a must. You need software that facilitates 1:1, group, and company-wide chat.

Project management software

Projects have lots of moving parts. And — particularly for non-office-based teams — it can be hard to visualize project tasks and progress without project management software.

This type of software acts as a centralized platform for planning and executing projects. It keeps all files, discussions, and tasks in the same place, ensuring nothing gets lost and everyone is aware of their responsibilities.

Project management software is particularly useful for remote and hybrid teams. But it can still come in useful for purely office-based teams.

Streamlined communication, workflow automation features, file organization, task visibility, and real-time updates are useful for teams wherever they may be working.

Employee apps

For employees who don’t spend their day at a desk, an employee app is another vital workplace collaboration tool.

As Ian Gordon of Elara Caring said to us in an interview:

“Being a frontline worker can feel like you're on an island by yourself, and the solutions that you need must be quicker and more succinct. You can't spend a lot of time signing in and navigating. You need to get to your answer now.”

Apps, like Blink, fit Gordon’s description. They’re intuitive to use and available on employee smartphones. They also make it quick and easy for employees to complete tasks, whether that’s sending a message to a co-worker, checking the latest policy documents, or filling in a safety report.

Employee apps support collaboration for time-poor frontline workers. They help them build connections with co-workers, share their frontline insights, and keep up to date with company news, improving the employee experience in the process.

A resource hub

Whether it’s on your company intranet or an employee app, a digital resource hub is another useful tech tool for employee collaboration.

A resource hub allows co-workers to share files and work together on them. It also acts as an internal knowledge base.

Here, employees can find best practices, company policies, and FAQs. If they have the appropriate permissions, they can also add their own insights to the hub, tagging documents so employees can find them easily.

AI and automation

AI and automation tools are also playing a role in employee collaboration. They’re providing time savings that give team members more opportunities for collaboration. And they’re supporting collaboration in other ways, too.

Companies are using this tech to automatically tag resource hub documents so users can find what they’re looking for more easily. AI is producing better resource hub search results.

AI is also supporting employees in their use of data. With automated data analysis and predictive analysis, AI is giving employees a sound basis for their collaborative problem-solving and decision-making efforts.

Some organizations are also using AI to facilitate communication between different departments. For example, technical teams are using it to translate complicated documents for non-technical co-workers. 

This is helping to close the communication gap between departments and ensure that everyone has the information they need to collaborate effectively.  

In summary

Workplace collaboration has changed dramatically over the past decade. But it’s still a key indicator of business success.

Collaboration supports workplace productivity, communication, and business results. It leads to better problem-solving and decision-making.

It also supports your employee retention and engagement efforts by making your workplace an open and supportive place to be, improving the employee experience.

Face-to-face collaboration is trickier than it used to be. But with the right tech solutions, you can champion collaboration in your organization, no matter where your employees spend their work days.

Blink has everything you need to bring collaboration to your desk-based, remote-working, and frontline employees. Our mobile-first employee app provides:

• Real-time communication via 1:1 and group chats, plus the company news feed
• A resource hub, where employees can access company documents and forms
• Deep integrations with the project management tools you already use
• AI support that supports better workplace communication

With Blink, you also get all the tools you need for better internal communications and employee engagement.

Why not book a demo to see Blink’s modern intranet in action?

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