Where does collaboration come from? It comes from communication, from drive, and from a shared passion to achieve great things as an organization. Microsoft Office 365 has produced this helpful webcast to help you understand how you can foster a culture of collaboration in your workplace.

You can put all the physical and digital strategies you like in place but without an underlying ethos of collaboration, the effect on your workplace will be minimal.

Instead, the right environment must be fostered in order to incubate collaboration in your office and beyond, encompassing your whole organization.

Of course, building collaboratively-focused office spaces and having the tools in place to work together on remote projects is important. But this only provides one-half of the solution. What you are aiming to achieve is a cultural shift; a change in the very fabric of what makes your office tick.

If you want collaboration and the advantages it brings, you need to inspire it. Here’s how…

Make the Advantages Known

The carrot and stick management analogy has long been put to bed and dismissed as overly simplistic. Instead, a more sophisticated – and, yet, blindingly obvious – approach is required, which is simply to outline the advantages of high-quality collaborative work.

The motivations of your team members are too wide-ranging and diverse for a catch-all rewards scheme. For example, individual staff members may have a complex set of driving factors in their heads when they approach work.

This means, what may motivate some of your team may be meaningless to others. Instead, we need to demonstrate how collaboration can be done properly and how we can achieve a serious benefit by adopting this approach at work.

Discuss best practices, examine case studies, open up a dialogue across the whole team, and build the foundations of a collaborative environment.

The Power of Narrative

Stories, by their very nature, are inspiring. Stories are also inclusive and collaborative. While, nowadays, we have the idea of a person reading a book alone, probably a book authored by a single person, this is not where stories came from.

Stories began with the oral tradition; ballads and sagas developed collaboratively over time and delivered to an audience en masse. Tap into this idea when it comes to inspiring your team to work collaboratively.

Share stories and experiences. Provide an open forum for others to share their own. By working in this way, you are helping to create an atmosphere of action and sharing, rather than passivity and reservation.

When outlining the benefits of collaborative work in terms of both personal and organizational development, build and illustrate a strong narrative.

Lead From the Front

It goes without saying that inspiring a change in the workplace involves taking the lead and showing how it can be done. Of course, the same is true for building a collaboration culture. However, you may be surprised by how many leaders ‘talk the talk’ but fail to ‘walk the walk’ in this regard.

Simply telling your team what they need to do is not going to cut it. They already understand what collaboration is and what teamwork looks like. It is up to you to show them its specific applications within your organization.

Examine past initiatives and understand how they could be handled better in the future. Consider how teams can be built so they are made up of individuals who complement the skill sets of one another. Place yourself on the front line as an example. This is a significant step towards creating a collaborative atmosphere with a long legacy.

Focus on Mobility

Setting the ball rolling on collaboration at work does take a degree of effort. This, however, is not the most difficult part of fostering the right atmosphere.

Getting team members accustomed to discussing issues and working together on different projects is straightforward, provided this movement is lateral, taking place on the same rung of the proverbial ladder.

It gets a little more difficult when vertically integrated collaboration is required; when mobility between different levels is expected.

This is wholly dependent on the culture discussed above. The modern workplace needs to be the breeding ground for a culture of mutual respect, openness, and a willingness to share ideas.

All team members, at all levels, need to feel comfortable and confident that they will be treated with respect at work and that their ideas will be listened to. The flipside of this is that all ideas – no matter which echelon of the organization the idea comes from – are open to debate and reasoned disagreement.

By creating this sort of open and mobile atmosphere, you are clearing the way for innovation. The most ingenious ideas do not necessarily originate at the top but are developed collaboratively.

Build Your Toolkit, and Your Environment

Developing a positive atmosphere of collaboration is one thing but this needs to be supported by the environment. Your team needs to have a workspace in which their collaborative efforts are complimented and enhanced, for example, through the provision of in-house conference areas and rooms, or via hardware pieces designed to enable remote communication.

Your team also needs a range of digital tools, applications and platforms to help them achieve the objectives they set for themselves.

These include scheduling tools to brings tasks together and to ensure progress towards set goals, collaborative work platforms to unify efforts and ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction, and automated systems which can take care of some of the heavy lifting associated with collaborative working, leaving teams free to focus on their strong points.

Inspiring smart collaboration is about laying the groundwork and making sure that all elements – whether they are physical, digital, or conceptual – are in place. From here, high-quality collaboration can be easily achieved.

Microsoft Office 365 has even produced this helpful webcast to help you understand how you can foster a culture of collaboration in your workplace.

Click here to view the webcast from Microsoft Office 365.

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Here’s an important question most business leaders have probably never asked – but it could be the key to future growth and organizational prosperity. How free do your employees feel in the workplace?

Without an environment of authentic autonomy, your workforce is limited by both overt and subtle controls and influences. While workplace rules, policies, and expectations are absolutely necessary for a functional business environment. This is true from six-person start-ups to enterprise level corporations.

It is this same guiding framework that can suffocate the life and creativity out of a collaborative team if left unchecked. The structure designed to facilitate and leverage your employees could be what is extinguishing their ability to thrive, expand, and grow.

This e-book called “The Psychology of Collaboration” from Microsoft talks about the importance of collaboration in 2017. Because it is often it is the unspoken rules that limit us more than the spoken ones.

For example, managers may claim their employees are empowered and free to come up with ideas, think outside of the box, or veer away from the standard way of doing things.

But in practice taking such creative license must be done at one’s own peril. You can put a team of the best minds together but if they don’t feel free to express their ideas and push each other in a safe environment, they’re not going to.

Teresa Amabile, who has studied workplace creativity and productivity for decades and is the author of numerous books on the subject, including The Progress Principle, says that often managers only grant autonomy in name. The reality is that employees are forced to diverge at their own risk and so often don’t.

The Cost of Disempowerment

When asked about what is important to achieving organizational success, 71 percent of executives surveyed for a Harvard Business Review report cited employee engagement. We’ve known for some time that engagement is an essential component of business growth. Highly engaged organizations are known to have double to rate of success, dramatically reduced levels of turnover and absenteeism and 22 percent higher productivity.

Still, for many companies, engagement isn’t happening. As few as 13 percent of employees feel highly engaged. Only a third of workers in the US feel engaged at all, and the majority are simply not that committed to the companies they work for. The cost of this apathy is estimated to be between $450 and $550 billion in lost productivity every year.

While employee well-being initiatives, team building exercises, and even casual Fridays and modern collaborative environments can do a lot for motivating and engaging a team of individuals, all of these strategies are overlooking a key factor to facilitating engagement.

In order for people to feel vested in what they do, they have to be in control. A study published in Psychological Science found that employees were 26 percent more satisfied with their work when they held a position of power.

How Can Business Leaders Better Empower Their Teams?

This doesn’t mean it is necessary to create a scenario in which everyone is the boss. We all know what happens when there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

What it does imply, however, is that all individuals should be granted some degree of autonomy over how they work. As Amabile explains, “Creativity thrives when managers let people decide how to climb a mountain; they needn’t, however, let employees choose which one.”

For example, having the freedom to determine their own process and within which environment they can complete different tasks can completely revolutionize the workday for many people.

Psychologist Herman Miller explains that something as simple as recognizing and allowing space for the needs of introverts and extroverts, permitting each to choose what works for them, can facilitate greater comfort, less stress, and an exponential increase in productivity.

Nuances like room color, noise level, aesthetics, and having a private or open environment can have a huge impact on an individual’s ability to get work done and more importantly, to be creative.

Giving introverted employees the autonomy to collaborate virtually from home and extroverted workers the opportunity to engage with co-workers in a stimulating atmosphere such as a coffee shop down the street or an employee lounge area, can bring out the best in both personality types.

Another powerful way to give employees more autonomy is to delegate more decision making tasks. A great leader knows what each team member’s strengths are, and uses them. If someone is highly creative, involve them in the next product development meeting. An individual who has experience in a particular area may be able to take on more responsibility for a project related to their area of expertise.

Consider which individuals may be useful at strategic planning meetings, no matter where they are in the organizational hierarchy. It is this type of non-linear workplace thinking that will allow people to shine based on who they are as a unique individual, not necessarily as a particular role or job title. It also lets your team know that they work in an environment where opportunities are open to them so they can learn and grow professionally.

Leaders can also empower their employees with frequent feedback. The idea of having an annual performance review is outdated and unpalatable to both employees and managers. Research shows that 77 percent of HR executives believe performance reviews are not accurate reflections of what an employee contributes.

Creating the opportunity to provide ongoing, constructive feedback, on the other hand, can allow for a positive feedback loop between management and employees. This can help to build trust, strengthen workplace relationships and can even foster greater equity.

Open communication channels can also be used to identify errors or deal with any areas of confusion before problems occur in the first place.

Today’s technology makes it easy to open up multiple communication channels. With instant messaging apps, video conferencing, and collaborative workplace apps, there’s no reason why managers and employees can’t leverage the potential of fluid workplace communication.

Automation Is for Machines, Autonomy Is for Humans

As we move deeper into the digital era and as our technology continues to evolve, business leaders need to understand the opportunity that is emerging today. Automation is freeing up every business’s most valuable asset – the human mind. We need to take advantage of this shift.

It is the responsibility of those in leadership roles to unlock the great untapped potential that lies within each individual. This does imply the role of manager has to evolve from taskmaster to guide.

However, by making a conscious effort to move in this direction and allowing your employees more control and empowering their actions and decisions, you’re allowing them to be more human. And that’s what will drive engagement, foster growth, and reveal the limitless potential of a business staffed by a team of committed, motivated, inspired individuals.

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The pace of technological innovation today isn’t just fast. Technology is evolving at an exponential rate. While in many ways, businesses have reaped the benefits of such progress, without a similar transformation of company culture, how can organizations truly harness what’s available?

Resources, even the remarkable innovations of today, are worthless if the human ingenuity is not there to leverage their potential.

How can leadership motivate their creative teams to visualize and formulate the platforms that will be able to sustain tomorrow’s expectations?

What can business leaders do to foster a healthy culture of transformation? One that is better able to work with the extremely evolved technology that we have available now, let alone what will be in existence three months, and three years from now.

As Aaron Dignan, Founder of The Ready explains in Microsoft Office’s Modern Workplace, the power of information technology and the fluidity of access to computing power has sped up the cycle of change.

We’ve gone from the advent of the Internet, which connected businesses and individuals on a global scale for the first time in human history, to the Internet of Things, (IoT), which has injected this infinite new world into the experience of everyday living.

From industrial machinery to the kitchen toaster, every device can communicate with the endless information on the web, increasing the amount of data available and fueling change even further.

It’s not that we are changing more than we were ten or twenty years ago. It is that the exponential rate of change has caught up with us to create the extremely fast-paced reality we are in now.

From Digital Transformation to Digital Transcendence

We are now experiencing the digital abundance we’ve been discussing for decades. We’re seeing the results of Moore’s Law, which predicted the number of components per integrated circuit would double every one or two years.

And Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, which pointed out that beyond the early stages of exponential growth, the results become extraordinary. They end up transcending our existing models and processes, and for many of us, our imaginations.

Artificial intelligence is the Law of Accelerating Returns in action. AI transcends the primary facets of digital transformation – products, employee engagement, customer relationships, and optimizing operations.

It has stretched our disruptive thinking into a new dimension, disrupting the disruption. And, it has done this before most organizations have even had a chance to undergo a successful three-dimensional digital upgrade.

The innovative companies who have applied AI to their digital transformation are light years ahead of those who are still testing the waters of automation and cloud-based technologies.

Instead of just transforming your products, with AI, there can be a fundamental shift in products and services.

Take, for example, Rolls Royce’s recent transformation of the aerospace industry with their TotalCare^® services, which use advanced analytics along with the IoT to uncover data insights and improve flight efficiency in ways that were unheard of before.

AI can be employed in numerous ways in-house, such as using analytics to filter your employees’ inbox or the use of chatbots to improve the employee experience.  AI and Machine Learning are also being used by numerous companies to streamline customer service, better connect with customers, and automate orders.

AI has permeated the office, the factory, the lab in countless ways, transforming the way businesses operate.

We now have data that completely streamlines the process of preventative maintenance of industrial equipment and the AI to drive our production lines. It has automated much of our marketing processes, allowing us to spend more time actually interacting with the consumer.

Artificial intelligence can predict market movements and offer better financial advice than its human counterparts. It has revolutionized medicine – we’ve been using machine learning to help discover new drugs and to construct models for testing and experimentation for years.

This shift towards ever evolving technological potential already has the momentum it needs to continue ad infinitum. Investment in AI increased by 746 percent from 2011 to 2015 – and topped $1.5 billion in 2016.

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How Can Culture Play Catch Up?

Almost every industry is going to see the sweeping changes that result from the application of artificial intelligence. Even CPAs can be made semi-redundant with the creative use of machine learning, as is the case with the Vancouver-based firm, Bench Accounting.

This company has reinvented how an accounting firm works from the ground-up, using machine intelligence to reduce error, boost productivity, and reduce the cost of accounting services dramatically.

What can leadership do to facilitate a culture that can make room for this type of positive transformation? How do we not just transform, but transcend?

Depending on where your business is now, making room for a new organizational culture to emerge can feel like a behemoth task.

But, you only have to take the first step right now. As businesses move ahead, towards a more open, inspiring, and creative organizational culture, it will be possible to envision the next step, and then the next.

Start by making the space for change and clearly visualizing what you want out of your culture in the future. Then you can design your roadmap.

Once you start taking this journey, just as has been done with technological innovation, you’ll start to see the other paths and possibilities, illuminating your two-dimensional roadmap for change to reveal a whole new three-dimensional world of potential.

• What incentives can be used to inspire your team to push boundaries and think outside of the box?
• Do you need to bring in individuals who have a fresh perspective, new skills, or more varied experiences to inject some energy into your workforce?
• How can your workplace processes transform? Instead of looking at ways to alter what is, consider starting from scratch and taking an honest look at what methods and strategies would be the most effective for accomplishing your organization’s goals that exist today.
• Change, especially behavioral change, needs to start from the top. Moving towards greater equity, open channels of communication, and an environment that encourages the growth of every individual are all steps towards a culture that will be better equipped to keep up with innovation.

According to Nancy Duarte, Principal of Duarte, Inc., the key to managing a team of creative people is to take a step back to get that all important perspective – at what stage is your team at within the greater process?

When you do this it is possible to see more clearly why some people are resisting and why others aren’t. She says, “There’s power in understanding who you are talking to and where they are in the grander journey.”

Disruption Is in the Eye of the Beholder

The disruptors, the great minds that are lighting the way for all of us, they aren’t discovering ways to become more efficient, to boost productivity, to form better customer relationships – they are creating new ecosystems to achieve these goals.

They are doing this with a mindset that is capable of both accepting innovation and finding a way to use it, to bend it at will to create solutions for their particular industry.

If organizational culture had committed to transforming along with technology decades ago, we wouldn’t even be using the word disruption.

Disruptive innovation is only disruptive to a culture that is not yet ready to evolve.

To learn more visit Microsoft Office’s Modern Workplace

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The word ‘efficiency’ gets thrown around quite a lot. When asked to name what we want to see more of in the workplace, many of us will say efficiency. Similarly, when asked to describe our best attributes, don’t be surprised when efficiency pops up again.

Maybe it is a cliché. However, clichés become that way for a reason; because they are true and valid. Imagine a wholly inefficient team in your workplace. What does it look like? Chances are, it looks like your worst nightmare, like a colossal waste of money, and a disaster for your business.

Don’t fall prey to inefficiency. Try out these six tricks for ensuring your team runs in a finely-honed, highly-effective manner, then to learn more, watch the Migrating to Office 365 from Google webcast from Microsoft Office.

Enjoy More Effective Communication

We tend to have a bit of a ‘quantity over quality’ attitude to communication. We listen to the loudest voice. We praise the individuals who have the most to say and we get upset at those who remain silent. While communication is undoubtedly invaluable in business, perhaps this approach is the wrong one. It leads to inefficiency at best and confusion at worst.

Instead, focus on effective communication. Pencil in two blocks of time each day that your team can spend checking emails and tell them to avoid email at all other times. Hold meetings only when positive outcomes are within reach in order to encourage efficient and meaningful debate. This will give your team more time to focus on achieving their goals.

Construct Digital Channels Which Pull Their Weight

The digital element of business has become vital. All businesses need to operate in digital channels. They need their own personally branded web presence and they need to be active on a variety of social media platforms. Unfortunately, too many organizations simply pay lip service to these channels, not using them effectively. Inefficiency is the result.

Let’s consider your marketing efforts. If you have a wealth of online content which encourages inbound impressions and clicks from users, this takes a significant amount of pressure off your outbound marketing team. For customer service, deploying an effective and well-publicized service channel on social media will make your human customer service teams more effective. Getting your digital strategy right leads to boosted efficiency across the board.

Build Your Efficiency Toolkit

But an effective digital strategy is not limited to your online presence. There are a wide range of applications and platforms which you can deploy to help you iron out any problems or issues within your team and to secure high levels of efficiency.

If you have a large team, which includes remote workers or staff members who have to operate in different working environments, there are applications that can help you to bring these disparate elements together into a harmonious whole.

Others enable companies to make accurate estimates of time and cost for projects, which can then be fed back to clients.

You should look for a suite of tools and applications designed to give you and your business the efficiency it needs.

Know Your Team, Assign Them Correctly

Your human team is your business’s most valuable resource. When you hired staff for your organization, you did so because these staff members had skills, experience, knowledge and ability, which could be applied directly to your business. You can look at building a business in the same way as building a house. If you hire a plumber, don’t put her to work on interior decorating. Or, if you hire an interior designer, don’t ask him to handle the wiring.

So, get to know your team. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Once this is understood, ensure that each and every task which is associated with your business is being taken care of by your best man or woman. Don’t leave anything to chance; put your team to good use and incredible efficiency will be your reward.

Foster Positivity at All Levels

Fundamentally, an efficient working environment must be a positive one. This means fostering a positive attitude from all team members at every level of the organization and building an atmosphere in which problems can be solved effectively and efficiently.

This is about far more than simply putting a brave face and a united front towards a potential issue. It is about creating positive frameworks in which those issues can be dealt with without damaging efficiency. Pro-active problem solving ahead of time, insight and understanding into improvements that must be made, and an organizational structure which everyone can be proud of; these are the results of comprehensive positivity.

The most enticing thing about efficiency is that you don’t need to put it off. There is no need to delay or stall in your quest for a slick and well-oiled workplace. All the tools you need to achieve this are right in front of you. It’s time to put these into action.

To learn more, watch the Migrating to Office 365 from Google webcast from Microsoft Office.

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In a world of infinite media choices, the best way to reach new buyers and new talent might be right under your nose. Your own employees represent the greatest opportunity to create meaningful marketing and to develop Human Resources programs that increase sales, while also finding and retaining top talent. Is HR the new Marketing?

In the battle for new talent, HR departments have been forced to expand their role from hiring and firing, overseeing personnel systems and processes, and handling benefit management to include leadership development and training, employer branding, and diversity initiatives.

HR has been forced to adopt strategies that look, well, very much like marketing. These days, HR develops campaigns to grow employer awareness, to build the employer brand as a “great place to work,” and to retain top talent. All traditional marketing objectives.

While many in HR have embraced these traditional marketing skills, the most effective companies are moving beyond HR simply applying marketing techniques to a whole new opportunity. These effective companies are actually activating employees as a new marketing channel to achieve both HR and marketing objectives.

Proceed With Caution

One of the biggest obstacles to achieving the potential of employees as a new marketing channel is the perception of marketing as advertising.

Asking (or forcing) your employees to share product content on their social media channels is just as dangerous as asking them to share (or guilting them into sharing) what a great place your company is to work.

Consumers are increasingly ignoring and blocking advertising messages, with some research even suggesting that promotional messages from brands can have the opposite of their intended effect. These misguided efforts can actually cause sales to decline!

While some employees may authentically share their excitement and passion for the products they work on, the projects they are engaged in, and the company they work for, (and we should celebrate that,) this is not a sustainable strategy for getting new customer or talent.

Content Marketing and HR

Content marketing has emerged as one of the hottest trends in marketing. Marketers are learning to think and act like publishers to create entertaining, interesting, or helpful content that consumers actually want to read and share (vs. promotional ads). And this approach allows a brand to reach, engage, convert and retain new customers.

The opportunity to activate employees to achieve marketing and HR objectives starts by creating content they naturally want to share.

As the first VP of Content Marketing at SAP, I learned to tap into the power of my fellow employees to create a marketing program that delivered massive ROI. The biggest lesson I learned: HR is the new Marketing!

With a limited budget for content, I asked our internal experts to write articles on whatever they wanted. We had one editorial rule: no product promotion. Our internal experts could explore their professional or personal passions and interests, even if it meant writing about cat videos. Because somewhere out in the world, I believed there was a potential customer, employee, partner or investor who might also loved cat videos. (No one ever wrote about cat videos. Bummer!)

I even created a slideshare deck to explain the value for these employees/budding content marketers:

• Grow your personal brand
• Increase or establish your authority on the topics you are interested in
• Gain new social media followers
• Maybe even find that new job or get promoted

We also encouraged this behavior by publicly recognizing our top articles and authors each week in a round-up post. We made rock stars of the best performers as their social connections and influence increased. And this drove more employees to sign up.

Today, that site has hundreds of employee contributors. All are growing their personal brand, while expressing their passions and expertise to the world. And many of the employees who don’t write articles voluntarily share the content with their social connections.

As LinkedIn’s own Jason Miller mentioned in his article, the trick is to define what’s in it for them.

Why does this work?

Because you can create massive momentum when we combine the needs of our customers, our employees, and our company based on THEIR own distinct interests:

• Companies want more loyal customers and talented employees.
• Employees want purpose and meaningful work that has real impact on their career and the world.
• Customers want to form relationships with brands on their terms and based on their self-interest

What you can do activate HR as the new Marketing:

1. Create a Customer-Centric Vision

Look around your organization, and you will see people above you, below you and beside you. The traditional org chart still exists to focus on your position in the hierarchy. But where’s the customer? Where is the customer in your org chart? 

Even if your company mission isn’t customer-centric (“we are the leading provider of widgets”), your marketing vision must be. And there is one simple formula to get there:

Become a sought-after destination for which topic,

In order to deliver what customer value or impact.

2. Create Content Employees Want To Share

According to LinkedIn, the combined connections of employees on the LinkedIn platform is 10X larger than any company’s followers. And just 3 percent of company employees sharing branded content generate 30 percent of the views and clicks on that content.

Platforms such as LinkedIn Elevate, social selling programs, and other tools can dramatically increase the reach of your content, grow your company’s social presence, and improve the effectiveness of marketing programs — without spending a single dollar on paid media.

But you have to create content your employees want to share. You might even ask them to help you. The trick is to explain what’s in it for them: creating or sharing content can help them build more connections, establish relationships with other leaders in your industry and grow their personal brand so they can achieve happiness in their careers.

3. Measure The Results

Measure the impact of your employee content sharing for your company. Demonstrate how it has benefited the employees (increased connections, awards and recognition). Discuss ways to profile your best customers as well.

And partner with your colleagues across HR, marketing, and sales to determine the best ways to continuously optimize what is working for everyone.

If you’re in marketing, it’s time to start thinking about your colleagues in HR as your new best friend. And if you’re in HR, it’s time to think about how marketing can help you acquire and retain the best talent — while making the leadership team happy as well.

This article originally appeared on the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Blog.