Whether your employees work in an office or remotely, collaboration in the workplace can make or break your business.
It’s not just good for engagement and morale: organizational silos cause 67% of collaboration failures. So you need to do something to break down those walls if you want your teams to succeed.
It’s not easy, though. 41% of employees feel it’s difficult to collaborate across departments, and 56% of remote team managers struggle to foster collaboration. Something needs to change. In 2026, when there’s more technology than ever to get us to connect, it shouldn’t be this hard.
Here are our tips on how to boost collaboration in the workplace by building a more collaborative culture:
Ask employees for feedback
Without your employees, you don’t have a business. You need them to be productive to do their jobs, and collaboration in the workplace is a key part of productivity. So why wouldn’t you ask them what they think?
Asking how they feel about collaboration within your organization, and ways you could improve it, will give you insights you’d never considered before.
Employees won’t always tell their team leads what’s going wrong until it’s too late, and supervisors may not think to ask to prevent it.
Sending regular surveys to find out can give you more insights that could prevent issues from spiraling, Or stop them from happening in the first place.
With Workrowd, you can automate the sending of employee feedback surveys. So then you get regular responses. The platform also analyzes the results for you, meaning you get faster insights, too. Get in touch to find out more.
Organize group gatherings
Your employee groups encourage collaboration in the workplace between team members from different departments. They can get to know them without the pressure of work, fostering better relationships and therefore better collaboration. Why not take things a step further?
Organizing gatherings where members from all groups can connect encourages those groups to work together, too. They could meet up around a particular speaker or just for a networking event.
If you really wanted to encourage collaboration in the workplace, you could give them the budget to organize the event themselves. This gives them additional responsibility and forces teams to collaborate and compromise, teaching them new skills and growing their network internally and externally.
If you’re not there yet with your groups and think they could be working harder for your business, Workrowd gives you everything you need. Keep all your employee initiatives together in one place, making them easier for team members to find and sign up for.
Use focus groups to inform new products and services
Employee focus groups could give you insights you’d never considered before that differentiate you from your competitors.
For example, disabled employees can tell you when something isn’t accessible. This matters whether your brand is built on accessibility or not: accessible products and services work for everyone, increasing your potential customer base and therefore the amount of money you can make. But without asking someone who has accessibility challenges, you may never spot the gaps.
Focus groups can also stop you from making huge faux-pas, such as the one that Starbucks fell into in South Korea recently with a marketing campaign that backfired.
Have regular check-ins
Regular check-ins mean you can solve problems before they become deeper issues. Letting things spiral can mean that tasks need to be redone, costing time and money.
But be sensible with your timing. 9am on a Monday morning isn’t it. Nobody’s caffeine has kicked in yet. Team members haven’t caught up with their emails. Those of us who aren’t morning people are still creaky from rolling out of bed five minutes earlier.
Do it at a more reasonable time, that allows people to catch up and remind themselves what happened last week, like 10am.
Alternatively, have the catch-up on a Friday afternoon. Let’s be honest: hardly anyone does anything on a Friday afternoon anyway. So a meeting to cover what’s been done, and what needs to be done next week, is actually perfect for a Friday afternoon.
That way, you can hit the ground running on Monday morning, no meeting required. Resulting in better collaboration in the workplace with less wasted time.
Evaluate your tech stack
Is your tech stack actually helping employees do their jobs, or is it making their jobs harder?
Sometimes tools that do more are simply too complicated. Not everyone has the time or patience to learn them. More is not always better.
Your team members are the ones using the tools, so you need to know what they think. You could send a survey or ask in an all-hands depending on your team size.
The more responses you have, the easier it is to get a consensus. It might be that they need more training, or it might be that you need to migrate to a different tool.
Ultimately, your tools should be improving collaboration in the workplace; not holding your team back.
Do a team-building activity with no devices
Relying on AI from beginning to end of any process is asking for trouble. It can’t think critically, and it can’t always problem solve. Humans still need to check its outputs. (See previous story about South Korea and Starbucks.)
But when so many people now rely on AI to do work for them — and are encouraged to do so — how do they hone the creativity and critical thinking skills that make them good at their jobs?
Team-building activities where technological devices aren’t allowed force your employees to use their brains and lean into their own strengths. They have to get creative because there’s no other way to problem solve. Perfect for reinforcing their existing skills, developing new ones, and learning what their team members’ strengths are so that they can apply them when they’re back in the office. Not to mention boosting collaboration in the workplace.
Activity options are endless. It could be anything from an outdoor challenge to games like Pictionary. Even jigsaw puzzles can help expand problem solving and collaboration skills.
Conclusion
Encouraging collaboration in the workplace doesn’t have to be expensive or overcomplicated. It’s as simple as asking what your employees want and getting ideas from them. They’re your most valuable asset, after all. And they’re the ones your decisions will impact. So why not get them involved?
If you’d like to find out what your employees really think, try Workrowd. Send automated surveys at specific milestones and get the responses analyzed automatically — giving you more time to act on the responses. Get in touch to book your free demo.
