Collaboration: Employee Engagement Yields Better Plan Execution [Execution Drivers Series | 4 of 4]
75% of organizations struggle to implement strategy (Harvard Business Review). However, whether you’re in the non-struggling 25% or you’re still trying to find the best way to implement and execute plans, it’s likely that fostering accountability, driving alignment, and providing visibility are still daily challenges. Even when those three drivers of execution are addressed, 100% of organizations will not be able to achieve their greatest results without facilitating collaboration.
Simplifying the ability to work together and track progress easily from teammate to teammate will help engage employees and ignite passions – so your organization’s objectives can maintain momentum and make an impact.
Why Do Organizations Need Collaboration?
Is everyone collaborating on the right things, and in the right direction? Is there a record of progress accessible to everyone?
Collaboration is an overused word, but it’s essential to successful strategy execution. No one executes in a vacuum, at least not successfully. And yet, collaboration is often the most time-consuming part of an employee’s day, especially when it’s related to a large initiative.
To collaborate effectively, an employee needs to keep other team members in the loop on their progress, without contributing to email overload or creating more noise. The team needs a record of progress that can be shared and discussed with leaders. And that record must be accessible to everyone, without living in a static Excel document on a single team member’s hard drive (or worse, in multiple versions on multiple team members’ hard drives).
Being able to easily access up-to-date project statuses is particularly helpful in fast-paced organizations during times of turnover. It’s expected that employees will move to different positions. While many leaving employees will likely help plan their transitions, think of how often projects get derailed simply because of a staff change. This audit trail doesn’t replace in-person knowledge transfer, but can certainly help fill in the gaps for the newly-formed group to continue to work together toward a successful outcome.
How to Save Time with Effective Collaboration
The most successful executors check on the progress of their strategic and operational plans frequently. While many organizations check in on a quarterly basis, this leaves very few opportunities to change course or respond to changes in the market. Your technology solution should enable frequent progress updates, and make the process as painless as possible. Painless progress updates mean you’re more likely to be operating with fresh and frequent data, which means more opportunities to course-correct.
The best solutions offer a way for contributors to make updates directly from an email, and only send a single email containing all updates that need to be made by a single owner, even if the contributor’s updates are tied to multiple plans. This allows contributors to seamlessly make all of their updates, without even having to log in or navigate to multiple places in a new tool.
Want More?
Download the guide on how to overcome other common plan execution problems by enabling collaboration and the other three drivers of strategy execution, or read more in our Execution Drivers Blog Series. Check out our resource library for more tips to help make collaboration simpler – and better use of time – to actually execute what you set out to do.
