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
Other resources and links:
Collaboration is King: How Game-Changers Create Marketing
...
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/302126
https://www.wrike.com/blog/business-benefits-of-team-collaboration/
https://www.roberthalf.com/blog/management-tips/the-value-of-teamwork-in-the-workplace
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