Description

Promote a collaborative environment by making virtual collaboration tools available to all individuals. The value added of such tools as web conferencing increases exponentially if the tools are used frequently across an organization. They should become part of every executive’s daily routine and treated no differently than telephones or email. Utilize suitable senior executives as role models.

Benefits

• Increases creativity of teams resulting in better solutions.
• Increases cooperative & collaborative behavior resulting in increased leverage of existing knowledge capital.

Implementation Considerations

• Collaborative tools can reduce the need for face-to-face interactions.  However, it is important to identify the type of work that can be conducted remotely vs. the type that must be done face-to-face.
• Many organizations reward & recognize individual performance.  However, to promote collaboration, team achievements need to be rewarded.  Consider implementing a scorecard that includes team-based achievements.  The input should include objective project metrics as well as qualitative feedback from key stakeholders.

Metrics

• Number of collaborative tools
• Frequency of usage per collaborative tool