All about collaboration and the future of work

Despite the emergence of some amazing software products for team collaboration, better team communication, hybrid working and employee productivity, all designed to align employees and employers in more ways than ever before, the threat of organizational silos for early stage startups and startup growth is increasing.

Some recent research shows that on average 40 percent of company employees report that they feel siloed because "different departments have their own agendas."

While organizational silos negatively impact employee communication and team collaboration — both of which are critical success factors for delivering the best customer experiences and ensuring you have the right product market fit — the increasing problem is becoming more linked to the impact on startup revenue growth.

After all, just because you have the best online collaboration tools in place, it doesn’t automatically guarantee your team collaboration effectiveness.

If you don’t combine a culture of information transparency with team collaboration software tools and bast practices; the negative impact of organizational silos will quickly become apparent.

If you are active on social media, you will have seen the term 'The Great Resignation'.

Is it a flash in the pan or should you be concerned by how it will impact you, and your company?

We conducted some analysis within our client network, the results showed "an 89% employee retention rate (based on voluntary turnover) throughout the pandemic, compared to the market average (UK, Europe and US combined) which averages 71%.

The 3rd party external analysis paints a similar picture, and overall impact begins to form when you look closer at organizational behavior, workplace culture and cross-functional alignment.

Our view is that people and organizations who are being impacted by 'The Great Resignation' have a combination of alignment and culture issues, which could, and should have been fixed before the impacts on our working lives created by the pandemic.

If you care about your employees, the environment you create for them to work in and focus on creating and maintaining a positive workplace culture, then you should have nothing to worry.

On the other hand, if you are part of a company which have neglected your organizational culture and cross-functional alignment for too long, you might be facing the cliff of 'employee disengagement' or worse still, your team are already completely disengaged.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Dr. Adrian Reisch, Co-Founder at aioneers, to discuss their fascinating growth story, team collaboration effectiveness, startup culture and building outstanding teams.

aioneers was founded at the beginning of 2020, led by six former Ernst & Young partners with 20 years of shared work experience.

The company went operational in mid-2020 and quickly grew to a team of 25 people, which has since grown to just under 60 employees.

The aioneers ambition is to enable companies to boost their performance with technology, having observed efficiency and capability gaps impacting most companies across the market. This is particularly the case in terms of supply chains, although these challenging gaps are not exclusive to the space.

The Flowtrace Partner Program is designed for organizations who want to help their clients gain greater business benefits from in-depth team collaboration analytics.

In the last two years, the relationship between employer and employee has changed. We have all had to adapt the way we work, how we communicate with colleagues and how we effectively collaborate within our teams.

With the launch of the Flowtrace Partner Program, the company is looking forward to building new strategic partnerships to help more organizations utilize the power of Team Collaboration Analytics, Slack Channel Analytics and Google Meeting Analytics.

If you’ve ever tried searching Google for “team collaboration tools” or “team collaboration assessment tools”, I’m sure you have already discovered that the results are varied and cover many different areas of cross-function collaboration, employee engagement, employee productivity, HR software and even employee performance management.

Our ‘Company Collaboration Health Check’ assessment tool is designed to help you gain more understanding about key aspects or your organisation, employees, culture and technology which influence your team collaboration effectiveness.

Why is cross-functional collaboration so important?

No two companies, even if they’re both startups competing in the same market, are exactly the same.

What makes companies different, what evolves their culture, what gives them competitive advantage - Is their people, and those people which make all these difference are super-charged when they can collaborate effectively with one another.

Even before our working lives were interrupted by a global pandemic, a movement has been growing for a long time, where email is becoming less important for organisations and internal communications, and the rise of digital communication and startup team collaboration software tools are becoming the focus.

When you combine this with recent research that shows ‘unproductive internal meetings are cited as useless’ it is no wonder, and for good reason, remote collaboration software is on the rise.

From effective hybrid work team collaboration to project management, from employee productive metrics to team collaboration analytics, collaboration software providers offer an abundance of options.

The best team collaboration software makes it simple and easy for teams to work together on day-to-day tasks as well as specific strategic projects.

Collaboration is fast becoming the new normal in the workplace, and an integral part of startup culture. Employees are no longer expected to work in silo from one another. This growing focus on effective team collaboration brings many benefits from improved efficiency, organic innovation, customer-obsessed focus, talent retention, increased productivity and a highly engaged team ethos.

Startup culture is a key criteria for being an asset to your startup. It can influence many aspects of your success from how effectively you build a product to how quickly you gain traction with your target market, to customer brand loyalty and how aligned your employees are to your focus strategy.

Building and maintaining this culture takes time and effort, but the payoff can be huge — both for your company and for your personal growth.

As entrepreneurs, we are often motivated by our desire to prove ourselves. This motivation can blind us to other possibilities. When we begin our venture, we might overlook the difficulties that might be associated with pursuing said endeavor.

Instead, we focus on how to secure the next funding round—whether it be via investment or debt financing—and often lose sight of some factors that can bring huge rewards such as Return on Culture, Collaboration in the workplace, A shared common goal and Competitive Advantage.

Startup culture is anything but static; it evolves and changes depending on the needs of the day. This means that some startups will be more successful than others. But, understanding what makes for a good startup culture can help you determine how your startup will thrive.

In this article, I will define ‘what is startup culture’ as it relates to team composition, talent acquisition and retention, business strategy, open communication and how leadership teams enable the best possible team ethos.

Building a startup is one of the most fun and rewarding things you can do in business. With so many tools and SaaS platforms available, it can be daunting to know where to start and understand the best startup software tools which are right for you to support your growth.

In this guide we take a comprehensive look at some of the best startup software tools, free plans and cool software to help you launch, run, manage, market, collaborate, scale and measure the success of your startup.

We have pulled on the experience of 100s of startups in this guide and asked for their feedback on software tools they have used when building their startups.

When we consider the big picture of 'the purpose of a work calendar' we realize that calendar functionality hasn't developed since the world moved from physical paper calendars to a digital world with Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar at the forefront.

This transition enabled 'shared and transparent' meeting management across organisations globally, making us more connected. However the question remains, why has there been no new innovations in the last 20 years ago? We cannot pinpoint any ground breaking additions to the calendars themselves.

Where we have experienced developments are from companies like Calendly and Hubspot whereby scheduling assistants can be integrated into email, websites, chat bots and other communication tools.

Startup failure. It cannot be eradicated. It is part of the startup ecosystem. Getting out-competed, no market need, team disharmony and running out of cash are just some of the common startup failure reasons within a long list. 

When you begin to look closer at the common startup failure reasons, a few things become clear:

1. Startups will always fail. There are uncontrollable factors. Covid highlights this fact, for some companies Covid has sparked amazing innovation and technology breakthroughs, where for others a global impact event has meant startups have had to pivot fast and many have found their market and revenue completely grind to a halt.
2. The real root cause of startup failure is rarely a single common reason. Multiple factors usually combine to cause a startup to fail.
3. It has almost become fashionable within startup circles that failure is seen as a badge of honor - “Failure is just part of the journey to success”. Where I agree in part, and in some instances we can learn more from failure than success, success is only ever created by understanding the real root cause failure. The common startup failure reasons addresses somewhat the strategic reasons for startup failure, but they do not address the tactical or operational reasons for failure, which typically are the real root cause.