Team collaboration is essential for every organization’s success.

But today, with teams being dispersed, there are more challenges for internal communication and employee engagement.

For example, organizations and employees find it harder to connect and communicate with each other when everyone no longer sits in the same office. Not seeing each other in person may hinder interactions and conversations among employees.

So how can we overcome this issue? How to build a culture of collaboration in remote teams?

In this blog post, we explore what organizations need to create a collaborative culture, and how the intranet can help bring employees together.

What makes good team collaboration?

Good team collaboration centers around effective communication and trust.

In order to work together effectively, people need to communicate constantly. As a leader or manager, you need to make sure that employees, no matter where they work, have no trouble finding and connecting with each other. And when they do, sharing information should be effortless.

Effective communication in the workplace also means that employees stay informed of important company news and updates, in a timely manner. One best practice is to establish a single source of truth for all communications – a place where employees can go for the most up-to-date and relevant information.

This helps to ensure clear and transparent communication in the workplace- a foundation for employee trust. With the right information delivered to the right person at the right time, there will be no room for confusion, unclarity and ambiguity – which are common reasons why team collaboration fails.

How can an intranet help to increase collaboration among employees?

The company intranet is designed to help your company and employee to collaborate more effectively, in many ways. Here is how.

The intranet fosters open communication.

Open communication is crucial for building trust, and trust is key to foster employee collaboration, as mentioned above.

Through the intranet, you can easily get information to your employees. Whether it’s important news, an event announcement or a significant change in working policy – the intranet centralizes all internal communications in one single place and acts as one single source of truth that employees can rely on to get the information they need.

And by adding social features like commenting and liking, you give employees a voice too.

The intranet helps to connect people, no matter where they work.

Whether it’s top-down or bottom-up conversations, the intranet is a great tool to make it happen. A people directory on the company intranet enables employees to quickly find anyone in the organization.

Involv’s user profiles not only include basic contact information but also other interesting details such as language, birthday, hobbies and interests. This helps people to get to know their colleagues better and are great conversation starters when getting to know (new) colleagues.

Involv also has a mobile app that your non-desk workers can download to their smartphones to remain informed and connected. For organizations, the mobile intranet app is a fast and easy way to reach everyone; anywhere, anytime!

The intranet breaks down information silos.

Information silos occur when different departments or teams within an organization don’t have a system to communicate effectively with each other—and productivity and collaboration suffers because of it.

The intranet can prevent this from happening to your organization. It connects people, makes it easy to share files or even co-edit documents with colleagues. It acts as the content management system that enables employees to quickly find the correct and up-to-date information, when they need it.

The intranet facilitates knowledge/idea sharing.

In highly collaborative teams, people actively share knowledge or ideas with each other. To do so, they need a dedicated tool or space for sharing their thoughts and feedback as well as discussing ideas with colleagues.

The Involv intranet includes an ideation tool, making it easy for people to share their ideas and vote or discuss on submitted ideas.

Involv is built on the Microsoft 365 system, letting you utilize and integrate all your favorite collaboration tools such as Teams and Yammer with your intranet.

The intranet drives employee engagement.

The intranet can help improve team collaboration through social features. Simple actions such as reacting with a thumbs up on a news article, leaving feedback on a submitted idea, or mentioning a colleague on an announcement really help to show a collaborative spirit in the workplace.

Thanks to push notifications, employees are alerted of new, important messages wherever they are.

Summing up:

Achieving a good team collaboration doesn’t come easily. Maybe employees work remotely and are hard to reach, departments have become siloed, or delivering information via existing channels became less effective.

However, organizations can jump these hurdles to collaborate effectively by providing employees with a well-executed intranet.

Intranets have been proven invaluable as a collaboration tool for employees, in a number of ways. With Involv intranet, there are no more barriers to collaborate within different teams and departments. It connects your entire workforce and helps everyone, no matter where they work, to work together more effectively.

Would you like to learn more about Involv intranet and how it makes the difference for organizations like Plan International, Province Antwerpen and Royal Air Force Museum? Schedule a free demo with one of our intranet experts.

(Photo: Freepik)