Shared Services – Collaboration for Peace of Mind

Teamwork, one of the watchwords for today’s workforce and company environment, offers many advantages and opportunities - both for employers encouraging this trend – as well as employees in an organization. Workplace-Communication.com highlights 14 benefits to the collaborative efforts and results of teamwork such as higher quality output, better involvement, improved implementation and understanding, more discussion to clarify issues and come up with ideas, and improved relationships, better focus and sharing of expertise.

"Since the early 1990s, when teams became a corporate trend, a lot of work has turned into teamwork. Companies have assigned more and more responsibilities to teams, rather than individual employees or departments, and collaboration is seen as critical to getting good work done," explained in the Harvard Business Review article 'Teamwork Works Best When Top Performers Are Rewarded.' "Our findings in all of these studies support the notion that it is possible to recognize top performers and boost team performance at the same time. The bottom line is, get out there and recognize the top performers on all your teams — everyone will benefit."

Collaborative projects can be greatly enhanced when coupled with the added advantages offered by integrated Shared Services into an organization. "Management of complex, integrated enterprises may run more smoothly with the establishment of a Shared Services Organization. As companies have become increasingly more complex - but at the same time more integrated - the need for additional cross collaboration and more effective leveraging of the resources at their disposal has become increasingly significant," by Faisal Hoque from 'Collaboration and the Shared Services Organization.'

And while colleague collaboration can benefit from Shared Services – the opposite it true as well as highlighted in this example from 'How Collaboration can Benefit Shared Services' by Sarah Fane:

"…a great example from the Ford Motor Company, in which one employee looking for some technical expertise tapped out a plea for technical help using Yammer (an internal social network for businesses) and a colleague of his from another country directly, sent him the code he needed. This saved the time, money and energy used when people have to look externally and turned individual knowledge into organizational and global knowledge. As shared services centers are often located in various regions, but delivering similar services, social technology can be a great and efficient enabler of communication between sites."

"Working effectively as part of a team is incredibly important for output quality, morale, and retention," from Forbes.com article 'Why and Where is Teamwork Important?' by Edmond Lau, Quora Engineer. And integrating Shared Services into a company’s teamwork environment further enhances the efforts, productivity and results put forth – for a truly collaborative corporate culture.