Therefore, People Resolutions has made it our mission to help organisations move from conflict affliction to collaborative performance.
Whilst there is some research already out there about collaboration, there doesn’t seem to be one uniformed, agreed definition. Over our 11 years of working in this field with many organisations, we have developed our own definition:
“Collaboration is a workplace culture where employees across different disciplines and roles are able work together co-operatively in a converged manner towards the organisation's objectives. Through our experience, we have found that a number of organisational factors influence collaboration, and when missing, an organisation can suffer from conflict in addition to many other undesirable symptoms including high turnover, significant absence relating to work stress, competitive culture, silo working, resentment and low engagement.”
To ensure we are building cutting-edge consultancy tools to help move organisations to a collaborative culture, we are working in conjunction with Coventry University on a year-long project to measure the positive impact of this behaviour on business success.
We, of course, are not saying that there can be only one definition of collaboration and we understand that this may mean something slightly different for each organisation. Ultimately we believe in the importance of working with companies, firstly to understand where they sit on the "conflict to collaboration scale" and secondly to understand where they want to get to.
With that in mind, we would love to hear what collaboration means for you. Let us know your definition....
