In spite of the corporate businesses rhetoric of promoting teamwork and cooperation within the region, there are often unwritten rules that encourage individual employees to outshine their colleagues, urge not to share ideas and know-how and putting individual's own interest before the interest of the organization or the team. In such an environment, it is rather common that within weeks of joining a company, new recruits learn to talk up cooperation while acting competitively, or in certain circumstances refraining from sharing his expertise with his fellow colleagues.
Considering the diversity of employees and the feel of insecurity, the reality is that employees accumulate knowledge and rarely worked with each others. In fact, some employees tend to group with other employees of the same nationality and ethnical background to draw strength, even at the expense of his team members. Such culture is counter productive and organizations need to foster a culture of cooperation.
Collaboration within the corporate arena is particularly important for regional businesses, particularly considering the pressure to increase the percentage of the national workforce. To raise level of competencies, expatriate skilled employees are encouraged to share their knowledge and experience with their fellow local employees.
The nationalization process of the highly-skilled work force by replacing expatriates with national work force can be counter productive, particularly if the expatriate employees feel insecure. A better approach would be to increase the level of national work force through growth or by replacement due to national attrition. The provision of security to the highly-skilled expatriate work force helps collaboration and productivity at the same time.
In today's interconnected business environments, working closely with others across boundaries, creatively, and productively propel both organizational and personal effectiveness. It is often expected of employees to work as teams to execute tasks assigned to them. With the advent of advances in ICT, team can now work remotely with colleagues, suppliers, clients, and even competitors they never actually meet. Today's organizations depend on teams irrespective of the attribution and profile of the multiple teams in the workplace.
Collaborative business culture is best addressed during the hiring process of new recruits by hiring for cooperation. In addition to the normal process of matching candidate's competencies and experience with the job requirements, companies with cooperative culture give particular care and attention to their hiring practices, as they strive to seek to attract cooperative people and discourage highly competitive and individualistic recruits. To achieve this, companies should review the vacant job's competency requirements, they should include a proven ability to work in teams, deal with conflict, and share knowledge. If they do not, it's likely that people who are most capable of working collaboratively are screening out. Companies should ensure that employees involved in the recruitment process are themselves collaborative people who appreciative team work, considering that recruiters tend to employ candidates in their own image. So in order to recruit collaborative people, make sure collaborative people are put in charge of hiring.
Collaborative business culture encompasses new practices that foster collaboration. Hiring for cooperation is crucial because when new recruits joins a company, they tend to bring to their new position their own personality, attitude, and behaviors. But cooperation and competitiveness is a relative term. Depending on the environment, individuals play up or play down their natural tendencies to cooperate. The environment surrounding the individuals has a direct impact on his behaviors. For example if a collaborative person finds himself in a highly competitive working environment, then he is likely to refrain from being collaborative and tend to exaggerate the more competitive elements within his personality and broad working style.
Collaborative business culture supports mentoring process. The experience of being mentored is arguably one of the most strongly associated with highly cooperative people and teams. Mentoring can yield best result under the following circumstances: (a) when both parties volunteer for it, (b) when the mentor is skillful in active listening, and (c) when leadership and senior executives are mentors, acting as role models for the company. To institutionalize mentoring as an important driver for cooperation within a company, mentoring should be promoted and people trained to be good mentors. However, for best outcome the participation of both parties in a mentoring relationship should be made voluntary. Furthermore, senior executives should be encouraged to mentor less experienced team members. Such practices send out a strong cultural message that this is a capability that is valued in the organization
Collaborative business culture ensures that performance management rewards collaboration. The worst offender is when the performance management system rewards individual achievements and ignore team work collaboration. By the same token, a process that recognizes and rewards collaboration and team work tends to reinforce a culture of cooperation. To verify how well a company's performance-management process encourages collaboration, a number of questions should be raised: Does the performance management process allow employees to talk abut performance and learn from each other, or is it primarily a one-to-one, hierarchical process? The follow-up that built into the process is also critical, for example is it collaborative in nature and what proportion of recognition and reward is given for individual accomplishment or individual unit accomplishment, and what proportion is given over to recognizing and rewarding intra-unit team effort and cross-unit collaboration?
To cultivate supportive corporate culture, the leadership needs to pay attention to its processes, including recruitment and performance management, to ensure that they favors and rewards collaboration across teams as well as departments. The leadership is also responsible for setting up the right corporate culture by getting involved in the coaching process and collaborating with their fellow colleagues.
(Yahya Shakweh is a vice president at Advanced Electronics Company, Saudi Arabia. The views expressed in this article are the author's personal opinion. He can be reached on e-mail: [email protected])
