Collaboration

What is Collaboration?

Collaboration in a workplace can be defined as a method of working in which people come together to achieve a common goal in order to get a competitive advantage.

Collaboration allows people to work together to accomplish a specific and shared corporate goal. It comes in two forms:

Asynchronous, where the engagement can be time-shifted, such as when uploading documents or notes to shared workspaces or making a contribution to a wiki, and Synchronous, when everyone engages in real-time, such as in online meetings, instant messaging, or over Skype.

Collaboration takes place between two people or many people. They could be strangers or best friends. To collaborate with other individuals is to commit to the possibility of producing a greater outcome than one that would be developed by a single individual.

However, collaboration in the workplace can be described in different ways. It can take different forms. Individual teams can collaborate within their team, but then there are also opportunities to sync cross-functionally and across multiple organizations of the same company or similar projects in the same organization.

Here are some examples of people-focused collaboration at work:

• Team collaboration is where a group of people comes together to solve a problem or create something together.
• Cross-functional collaboration is when different teams within the same company but across different departments come together to execute a large project.
• Social collaboration is when a community collaboration or a form of crowdsourcing, social collaboration can involve perfect strangers teaming up over a shared cause or message.

Also, See: Kickoff Meeting