Your Guide to Smarter Collaboration for Your Team

In early 2020, the escalating COVID-19 pandemic forced organizational leaders to quickly reset business and workforce priorities. The pandemic’s scale and severity challenged most organizations’ views about what work was essential to deliver to their customers, shareholders, and stakeholders during a prolonged period of heightened uncertainty. To rapidly reorient their goals and operations, we saw that the most successful organizations turn to teams and teaming as the go-to unit for organizational performance — and team collaboration became the new superpower! But as some employees return to the office, teams are becoming more distributed than ever — making smarter collaboration more important than ever.

Teams — newly forming, growing, and reconfiguring — were supercharging organizations’ ability to pivot and get work done amid turbulent and demanding conditions. Teaming became an organizational life raft during COVID-19 because teams are often built for adaptability rather than predictability and stability. Teams can learn and adapt faster than individual workers alone, since teams of motivated individuals will challenge each other to come up with better, more creative ideas. 

With 58 percent of Americans reporting having the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week, McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey of 25,000 American workers shows that 87 percent of people are looking for flexible, remote or hybrid working arrangements. This data suggests organizations should invest in supercharging their teams — now in the context of permanently remote or hybrid work models — if they want to drive success and growth. To do it, future-thinking organizations have become increasingly determined to better support fully remote teams or teams that include both on-premise and remote employees.

This guide is for organization, team, and HR leaders looking to build, repair, or strengthen teams in order to boost team effectiveness. With the right strategies in place, you can better support team members in remote or hybrid working environments, enable more effective collaboration from where a team member works, and increase engagement so that your organization’s teams can power growth and success. That’s called smarter collaboration.