7 Steps to Improve Collaboration at Work

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Contributing Author
Oct 24 | 4 min read
Whether everyone in your company works from the same office or you’re part of a virtual team, engaging with others who have complementary perspectives can lead to increased productivity.

The setback of collaboration, however, is the possibility of a series of endless meetings to discuss various problems or issues without making any real headway, warns Nate Kontny, two-time Y Combinator graduate and founder of Draft, a collaborative editing tool that allows users to read, comment on and edit each other’s content, and clearly see and reject changes made by others.

Here are seven of his top strategies for collaborating efficiently within a team.

1. Have an agenda.

Are you trying to engage readers of your blog? Is your team working on increasing conversion rates? Does the speed of your website need improvement? Figuring out specific problems ahead of scheduled meetings ensures the time spent collaborating will be productive and efficient.

2. Keep your meetings short and sweet — and productive.

A common complaint in corporate culture is an endless series of meetings in which little is accomplished. This can be averted by setting a time limit for each meeting and agreeing to not only stick to the agenda but to also come up with specific strategies to experiment with by the end of the meeting.

“I don’t really like brainstorming meetings because most of the time it just degenerates venezuela whatsapp number database into this conversation [with people saying] ‘I don’t think that’s going to work,’” Kontny says. “We don’t know what’s going to work unless we actually set up some experiments and try this stuff,” he adds. Testing and tracking the outcome can help you strategize what the next step will be and is more productive than endless discussions.

The same is true for conference calls. “I make sure there’s some sort of problem that we’re solving that we can all get around, and as soon as we come up with some options, I like to get off the phone as soon as possible,” Kontny explains.

3. Start small and iterate.

So you’ve had a short meeting and attempted to troubleshoot the problems, but what is your next step? Come up with a quick solution.

“If I want to solve a problem, my goal is to get something out the door in just a couple hours,” Kontny says.

As a software developer, he can spend a day or two enhancing and developing a piece of software. But his goal when troubleshooting is to come up with a minimalist solution within a couple of hours and then test his proposed solution. “Then I can see if it starts to solve the problem and then I can make it better after that, and better after that. I really just like iterating on stuff,” he says.

Instead of spending weeks or even months discussing and developing a strategy, you and your co-workers must agree to first tackle a small project. If the results are positive, move on to the next issue.