Home Working: the Benefits of Team Cooperation

The recent health crisis has had a silver lining for many remote working tools. These flexible, speedy and intuitive tools have seen a deserved boom. However, maintaining successful teamwork while remote working also relies on management, willpower and corporate culture.

 

Using the results of related OpinionWay study, 40% of employees consider teamwork essential to the design and completion of tasks. A further 95% say cooperation promotes creativity, productivity and the well-being of employees.

 

When working at home, we still need to be working well as a team. For many, it is not just a matter of learning new tools but also adopting new business practises.

 

Fewer meetings, more cooperation

Who says you need a meeting to start a collaborative project? Before the Covid-19 crisis, an employee might attend an average of at least two meetings per week. That is a total duration of 4.5 hours per week, or nearly full three weeks each year! For executives, this figure is worse and becomes doubled.

 

However, meetings and productivity frequently do not go together. On average, barely half of these meetings (52% exactly) are properly productive, falling prey to a lack of formal agendas and proper decision making.

 

Working from home has had the benefit of reducing the number of unnecessary meetings, while still allowing teams to work together. Cloud workspaces make it possible for teams to work on the same document together, remotely or simultaneously. Everyone can join in, see the progress, and participate at a time that is best for them.

 

Cooperation brings confidence and productivity.

Collaborative tools bring many advantages. For example, 69% of users believe that these tools have an incredibly positive impact on knowledge sharing. 65% say they increase productivity. 60% say they see an increase in team motivation.

 

In addition to saving time, these tools also strengthen trust and transparency. When several people all have the same rights to work on a shared document, they have to trust their co-workers. Communication and a good team working ethic are vital components for the proper use of collaborative tools.

 

It is a surprising twist that collaborative tools promote teamwork, even though they for supporting home workers.

 

For collaborative management

Collaborative tools require managerial support to reach their true potential. The availability of the tools is not the main issue; 74% of employees have access. However, for 43% of them, a lack of involvement from management is the main barrier. Equally, 34% of employees consider that a lack of managerial support is detrimental to working from home.

 

There are innovative ways to make the most of remote collaboration. For example, a group of 4 to 6 people is the best size for remote work, so changing the number of people in your teams might be the answer.

 

Teamwork does not require sharing an office; in fact, 93% of employees say that working from home is entirely compatible with remote teamwork.

 

Though these figures come from studies carried just before the Covid-19 crisis, the trends they express are still valid. As Xavier Ginoux, CEO of OpenMindKfé said of a study ran with the Ipsos institute:

“The whole point of collaboration is to humanize the relationship between the company and its employees. For the latter, it is the means of no longer being a cog but a real stakeholder, whose knowledge, ideas and aspirations are taken into account.”

 

Find our “working well from home” range here.