Employee collaboration can benefit a workplace in a multitude of ways. Employees may be more engaged and content, good teams may be easier to set up for various projects, and information may flow more freely throughout the organization. HRIS can help to encourage employee collaboration by making it easy to communicate with all employees in the company, even from a remote location.
HRIS Offers More Options for Employee Collaboration
In the past, most employee collaboration was done in person or through e-mail. While the value of face-to-face interaction should not be underestimated, HRIS can allow employees many more options for collaboration. Instant messaging, forums, videos, and podcasts can all make it easy for employees to collaborate when there are scheduling or geographic barriers that make face-to-face collaboration difficult.
Project Data Storage and Development
Depending on the details of the project, employees may be able to actually work on the project collaboratively using the HRIS functions, as well as communicating about it. Depending on the capabilities of the HRIS, it may be possibly to share spreadsheets, documents, blogs, and other information and update progression in real time for all team members to see.
Employee Collaboration Benefits
When employees collaborate and work together as a team, employees often become more connected to team members and the organization as a whole. Teams are often greater than the sum of their parts, showing much higher productivity levels than are achievable by employees working individually. Collaborative efforts have built-in accountability, as employees often feel more pressure to meet or exceed goals when working as a team than when working alone.
Using HRIS to Build Teams
Instead of running several hokey and unproductive team-building exercises to see how well employees work together, managers can use competencies and other employee information that is detailed in HRIS to build teams. Using concrete information can help managers to ensure that employees on a team have the necessary skills to accomplish the goals of a project. It may be helpful to set teams to lesser tasks before moving on to more important tasks so that personal compatibility can be tested in addition to professional compatibility.
Allow Employees to Choose Teams
As a different approach, companies may allow employees to choose their own teams in order to ensure greater personal compatibility and to foster a greater sense of empowerment and freedom. The company culture and presence or absence of strong employee bonds may dictate whether allowing employees to choose teams or designating teams will work better. Some companies may find it beneficial to try both approaches for different projects and gauge the results of each.
Providing Feedback Following Collaborations
HRIS make it much easier for managers to provide feedback to all team members after a collaborative project has been completed. Depending on the positivity of results and the company culture, it may be beneficial to make the results available for all employees to see on the HRIS dashboard. Managers can provide further instruction using personal messages or group messages sent through HRIS.
