Why Collaboration Matters: With Your Team & Your Financial Reporting

Since people have to work together to achieve big goals, every successful project, as well as the overall company strategy, starts with collaboration. This is doubly so in today’s age of hyper-specialization. Collaboration in the workplace is a sign of a strong culture focused on creating an effective team to harness the best from two or more individuals. Yet, while we know that collaboration is best, it oftentimes feels overwhelming and even limiting. Our workplaces have become more and more virtual. Even if we don’t have multiple offices across the globe, we have a larger percentage of employees working remote. Not to mention our technology-driven workplaces, with real-time messaging, email, and text, have allowed even our under-one-roof office to dilute into a loosely-joined workforce at times. Studies have shown that team collaboration improves business growth and innovation. A recent Stanford Study found that even the perception of working with others on a task can improve our performance. Participants in the research who were primed to act collaboratively stuck with their task 64% longer than their peers who were working alone, while also reporting higher engagement levels, lower fatigue, and a higher success rate overall. And this lasted for weeks to come. “The results showed that simply feeling like you’re part of a team of people working on a task makes people feel more motivated as they take on challenges,” the researchers say.

Experts suggest there are a few key strategies to ensure workplace collaboration:

We don’t have to look farther than Hollywood to see the potentials of many individuals with various core competencies working together to create something better than any of them could on their own. No one on a production team is capable of producing a box office hit single-handedly. Real-time, two-way communication is essential – for a team to get on the same page, to creatively motivate and bounce ideas off each other, and to learn from one another throughout the process. The importance of collaboration extends to an organization’s financial reporting as well. Reports are oftentimes complex and include details, or totals, which require further explanation. Thus making it critical that your report writing software provides you the capability of including notes or documentation within the report itself. How many times have you wondered what makes up a total balance? Or wishing you had visibility into an invoice or pieces of communication further explaining a sum? This is where being able to collaborate within your reports becomes vitally important. Therefore as you look for a business intelligence reporting tool to meet your organization’s needs, be sure to choose one that gives you this option. One good example is Synoptix, which allows users to enhance team collaboration with its CollabX tool. This functionality allows you to add notes or ask questions about any balance to streamline decision making and simplify communication between departments. It also allows you to include additional security around which users have access to specific pieces of information. As all the research demonstrates, collaboration with your team and in your reporting software will pave the way for company growth and innovation.