Team collaboration is the prime face of any successful career and business.

Friendly competition always is healthy, but a business profits most when employees work together. Collaborative workplaces see increased levels of trust, a more engaged workforce, and improved performance. Collaboration is a key factor in building a small business because it works. People thrive in environments that free them to communicate and work together. When the company environment is focused on collaboration, team members naturally feel a part of something bigger than themselves. The best way to transition from an individual to a collaborative mindset is to equip each team member for active participation in the group dynamic.

One study has shown that collaborative teams are 5X higher-performing because they feel motivated towards a common goal. A recent study from Salesforce has revealed this to be the case. Of the 1,400 executives, employees, and educators surveyed, 86% noted a lack of collaboration was responsible for failures in the workplace.

Failure and success depends on value and degree of collaboration

What is the value of teamwork in the workplace?

Well, it takes many forms, including greater workforce efficiency and productivity, increased innovation, higher employee morale, and improved retention. And all those things can translate to real, bottom-line benefits for your company and its customers — further amplifying the value of teamwork.

Let’s have a look at prehistoric to modern-day collaboration history

The expression "two heads are better than one" reflects the intuition that people working in groups are more likely to come to a correct decision than they would if working alone.

Phrase, Proverb, or The old Saying: “Two Heads are Better than One” used to cover from Stone Age to modern digital age to stand out and survival of the fittest landscape.

Early in the Stone Age, humans lived in small, nomadic groups. ... Stone Age humans hunted large mammals collectively, including wooly mammoths, giant bison, and deer. They succeeded because of Collaboration and Teamwork. That was coherent and learned from nature.

Find the modern-day inspiration for building teams from the world of sports

A discussion about building teams naturally leads to a sports analogy — in this case, we’ll use Football. On a Football team, every player is working toward the same goal: winning the game. But every player brings different talents and abilities to help the team achieve that goal. Goal Keeper Defense Forward to Messy Renaldo the Striker- 11 the 1 TEAM. Focused on either side of the goalposts is the ultimate target.

We may take the example of our body function. The life cycle is a collaboration and unique teamwork between the heart and body organs. From center point HEART to top to bottom work relentlessly in bits and bytes. Any miscommunication might cause breathe failure! Highly synchronized is life? See Team orchestra…another collaboration teamwork example.

So, mankind from ancient Stone Age to dynamic electronic marketing age leaned the collaboration and teamwork. Society Social Media Groups Forums Q & A is an example of collaboration and networking of digitally connected remote mechanized togetherness.

Why is Collaborative teamwork important in digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a complete TEAMWORK of specialized skilled people’s amalgamation. When every campaign, project, and experiment is browseable, teammates can work together and also learn from each other.

This increases the speed of individual growth and makes the processes of iterating campaigns significantly more efficient.
To enhance productivity and continuous improvement and excel in specialization and division of labor.
When workers repeatedly do the same job they became excellent and expert and Master in that particular work.

Japan used batch production and automation and division of labor and they won the industrial revolution. Japan became a paramount industrial nation in the world.

In 1986 Masaaki Imai introduced to the Western world the Japanese term Kaizen and made it famous through his book, Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success. Translated in fourteen languages, Kaizen became a fad the world over. I was fortunate to be a direct student of Prof. Massaki Imai at AOTS, Tokyo, Japan April-May 1990 (45 days Scholarship Training on Entrepreneurship Project Management Productivity and TQC Japanese approach bottom-up administration)

Kaizen is a Japanese management strategy that means “change for the better” or “continuous slow improvement, a belief that all aspects of life should be constantly improved (from the Japanese words “kai” means continuous or change and “zen” means improvement, better).

Specialization of labor is most often known as the division of labor and refers to a process in business in which large tasks are divided into smaller tasks, and different employees or different groups of employees complete those tasks.

“The division of labour is the separation of tasks in any economic system or organisation so that participants may specialise (specialisation).” Wiki

The digital revolution has moved marketers closer than ever to realizing their ultimate fantasy – the ability to target specific messages to specific people at specific moments and places. And with tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of global consumers reachable and ready to be engaged through a wide range of platforms and devices, the power of effective digital marketing seems limitless.

Unfortunately, in many cases, much of the potential value is lost to the high cost and complexity of managing the “production” or execution of digital marketing campaigns.

Digital Marketing can also be defined as Digital Production. Digital Production is the process by which digitally created ideas and assets (images, text and interactive apps) are translated into a different platform of digital media – web sites, banner ads, rich media applications, HTML emails, mobile and social media applications – keeping in mind that the right messages are delivered with the right channel at the right time to the right customer.

High performance teams don’t happen by chance – they must be built. Before you can build up the digital marketing department in your business, you’ve got to establish a culture that will allow them to thrive that I am looking for…

What are the benefits of collaboration for team success?

Collaboration allows businesses to bring together people with different experiences, knowledge and skills, in order to accomplish common goals. It has a number of benefits: pooling talent, coordinating large projects, or creating new products, for instance.

The modern digital marketer has tremendous expectations to live up to. Just fifteen years ago, digital marketers were only responsible for SEO and ads. Today, “digital marketing” isn’t just one job; it’s an umbrella term for a slew of responsibilities. Anything that can get a product in front of a potential buyer can be considered digital marketing. That includes everything from content marketing to Google ads, to website design, to social media outreach.

Marketing continues to grow in complexity and accessibility, which makes building a high-performing team more difficult than ever before. After all, you can’t exactly put “social media expert, website designer, data analyst, and writer needed” in a job ad-even though that’s essentially what you’re looking for. The trick is to build a team that’s adaptable. This means hiring ambitious, creative, and flexible people who are equipped with the right tools to learn fast and iterate faster. Another best practice that I love…

What are 3 important skills for teamwork and collaboration?

Trust. The American Psychological Association defines trust as “the degree to which each party feels that they can depend on the other-party to do what they say they will do.”…
Tolerance. ...
Self-awareness.

What's the point of all focus on collaboration?

According to a white paper by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, when collaboration permeates the entire organization, there are huge benefits to your bottom line, which includes engaged employees, retention and attraction of talent, increased velocity, and profitability.

But these aren't the only benefits of team collaboration. We took a look at our own experience, how internal, external, and virtual collaboration in Wrike has impacted the company, and we realized that a collaborative culture is actually the single most potent element for an organization's survival.

If we want to excel in the digital marketing industry, there are a few skills you need to foster to bolster your professional prospects.

Always have to think nimble

Think Nimble | Technology moves fast, changing the dynamics of the company structure and the way things get done. We provide clarity and support. Someone who is nimble is able to move their fingers, hands, or legs quickly and easily- here flexible, adaptable, self-starter quick learner.

The dynamic work environment means that there’s a lot of individual learning going on. I said that in order to be a successful digital marketer, you have to be incredibly entrepreneurial in your thinking. We must be an ever Learner to co-opt with the dynamic tech and business world indeed.

Project and process benefits

When a group comes together to collaborate, it inevitably results in the sharing of knowledge and experience. By the end of the collaboration, long-held beliefs are likely to have been challenged, established systems and work practices pulled apart, and workable shortcuts identified. As a result, specific skills and ‘hacks’ that help achieve project or task success get widely distributed throughout an organization and even become commonplace. This amplifies the positive impact of an effective collaborating team throughout the company, and future collaborations can build on its success.

At the end of a successful collaboration, team members themselves are better equipped to bring projects to fruition, having worked through various shared processes and systems in different cultures and environments. This, in turn, should eventually result in greater and wider organizational success.

Team members have also learnt how and when mistakes occur, and what they can learn from them. In effect, they become ‘bloodhounds’ who are constantly seeking to streamline and improve future projects, processes, and systems.

Personal benefits

Working with a group of people on a common project, with a common goal, is a powerful driver of personal success. Being part of an effective collaborating team can help you earn a reputation as a person who gets stuff done and who achieves results.

It can also help you to feel good. When you engage with others in the collaboration process, positive endorphins are released. You are more likely to experience powerful feelings like camaraderie and a sense of fun in your work environment. In addition, you enjoy an increased sense of personal worth from belonging to an effective team. If the team is successful with its assigned project, you will soon start to recognize the powerful feelings generated by success, and will want to replicate those feelings again and again into the future. Success feels good.

As an individual within a collaborating team, life can be fast-paced and exciting. As you get used to working collaboratively, you will probably find that your own pace of work - and success rate - increases too.

After successful collaborations, individual achievements are likely to be recognized, formally acknowledged, and celebrated. You may find yourself getting promoted based on your involvement in a successful collaboration. At the very least, you will enjoy increased personal recognition throughout your organization, and will be more likely to be invited to join future team collaborations.

Collaboration Across Business Functions Grows

When digital marketing professionals were asked the level of collaboration digital marketing has had with various business functions within their companies for the years between 2018 and 2020, at least half reported increased collaboration across sales (75%), customer service (60%), product (59%), IT (57%) and PR/communications (50%).

These professionals are optimistic about the state of their collaboration in the future, as well. Similar shares of respondents are hoping to further their collaboration with sales (75%), customer service (59%) and IT (57%), while even more are aiming for increased collaboration with PR/communications (58%) and product (64%) teams between now and 2022.

The quest for sales and marketing to become less siloed seems to be paying off. A scant 3% of respondents say there is little to no collaboration between marketing and sales teams, with only 13% saying that feedback and collaboration is ad hoc through unstructured in-person conversations that result in manual updates.

Instead, for close to 6 in 10, feedback and collaboration is either regular, software-enabled with disconnects resolved automatically through algorithms (23%) or periodic, software-enabled and results in manual updates (34%).

Collaborating on Marketing Campaigns

Just 1 in 10 respondents say that marketing campaigns/programs are designed by digital marketing leadership and only known within the marketing team. The remainder are employing at least some degree of collaboration, with two-thirds collaborating with sales in designing campaigns (32%) or by aligning with sales on best moves after campaigns have been designed by marketing (35%).

Showing a more expansive degree of collaboration, close to one-quarter (23%) say that key groups across the business that vary by function, geography or product all have input into marketing campaigns/programs created by a central digital group.

The full report can be found here.

About the Data: Results are based on a survey of 476 senior digital marketing executives across North American, Europe and China from companies with at least 1,000 employees.

When you're developing a brand as a marketer, you need the help of several people. Check out these 5 collaboration tips all digital marketers need. You need the help of several different people all working together to make things happen. Developers, designers, and marketers are a promotion dream team and you need cohesiveness to make it all work.

Tips Every Marketer Must Follow For Collaboration

1) Organized Communication

When trying to create a game plan for your marketing strategy, you need to make sure everyone on your team is able to communicate with each other. You also need to know that everyone can follow the conversation easily.

2) Use Proper Visuals

Marketing is inherently a primarily visual activity. Visual aids are useful to help your team work together to toward the same goal. You should have them stored all together in one cloud server that your team can freely access at any time. This makes presentations much easier since everyone can bring up the same information, at the same time.

3) Be on the Same Page (Literally)

When you email documents from one team member to the next, someone may make changes, suggestions, or notes and then pass it around. But sometimes it misses someone who needs to be CC’d and then you end up with multiple versions of the same document. This can be incredibly frustrating, time-consuming, and will impact the productivity of your project. Make sure you pick a cloud storage service that allows for easy collaboration with real-time updates. So you know you are all accessing the same document.

4) Create a Community/Team

When people feel like they are contributing to something bigger than themselves, then they are more likely to do a better job and also be happier. When you have a project that requires collaboration, create a space that coworkers can come together and share ideas and information quickly and easily. When you have a problem that arises, it helps to get a different prospective. This is why collaborative communities are a creative way to solve issues while also maintaining a team atmosphere.

How to Create a Collaborative Community:

· Create a collaborative space that makes it easy to contribute.

· Ask open-ended questions.

· Hold brainstorming sessions with the group.

· Compliment members in the group on their strengths.

· Assign clear tasks with milestones and check in when milestones are completed.

Wrike

· Wrike is an easy to use project management system that uses more of a list-based assignment system. Good for those whose brain does better with to-do type organization. It has a free and a premium version which allows users to test before committing to a monthly purchase. Wrike gives a great way to organize but less visually appealing than other programs.

Note: I have used the Wrike throughout my digital marketing specialist career with Money Mouth Marketing. This is easy and Google developers FREE tools. Google tools and apps are incredible for marketers using one sign for all.

When you put together the right people, the right methods, and the correct tools, you have a powerful problem-solving machine that can make any campaign successful. Marketers have a tough job but luckily there's a multitude of ways to make the job just the littlest bit easier.

5) Strategies and tactics to leverage collaboration

Collaboration has become such an important way of working that it has inevitably become the focus of many different studies and research papers. It’s easy to get lost in all the analysis so below are three interesting and actionable conclusions from some of the most comprehensive research papers:

Understand role clarity and task ambiguity

When teams or individuals have decided to collaborate, there’s a common assumption that a clearly defined approach toward achieving a goal is essential. However, research from HBR has shown that collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood. When individuals feel that they can do a significant portion of their work independently, they innovate and find different ways to reach a specific goal.

“Communication is key.” let’s update this old adage for the internet age, “collaboration is key,” and nowhere more so than on a content marketing team. The creativity and innovation needed in this field is best fostered on teams, and success depends on working well together.

From finding the right audience, generating ideas for content, creating shareable and accessible content, and publishing the content in attractive ways, it’s difficult for one person to do it all themselves, nor should they.

In short, finding creative ways to promote your brand should be a team effort.

The creative nature of a content marketing means that working well together with colleagues can set your team apart from the competition.

When team members on content marketing teams are working together towards a common goal, rather than individually or at odds, your chances of success increase dramatically.

And thus we come to the contradiction at hand. We know collaboration is crucial, particularly for highly creative fields like content marketing, and yet most companies aren’t good at it. I am thriving to find the right company to learn and grow with the company to establish an ongoing lifetime relation partnering…

Findings and final thoughts:

Collaboration is a must to drive success with a common goal. From pre-historic to modern-day electronic media there are nothing alternative other than collaboration. We LEARNED that:

One study has shown that collaborative teams are 5X higher-performing because they feel motivated towards a common goal.
Collaboration is KING: Failure and success depends on value and degree of collaboration
Digital Marketing can also be defined as Digital Production. We should apply productivity and continuous improvement
High performance teams don’t happen by chance – they must be built.
Nimble is the main quality of all TEAM members are flexible and adaptable alike fingers.
We have to build a CLUB or commune and peoples with a common goal alike Football TEAM