What are the drivers for collaboration?

How Can Leaders Measure Collaboration?

How can companies identify and measure collaboration? How can the cause and effect be quantified for its affect on ROI, innovation, process improvement and more? Real time and team-based collaboration are just two types of collaboration. Add all the types of collaboration groupings (i.e., collaboration between two departments or collaboration that happens with outside clients), and you realize how complex and expansive collaboration can be. 

The issue is that very few companies have current state metrics for the following areas that can measure the success or failure of the effect collaboration has in process improvement, innovation, employee retention and more. 

Corporate Entrepreneurial leaders know the components of collaboration and can identify the state of collaboration based on a set of metrics. These are not put in a report format, they are part of a leader’s corporate wisdom.  Corporate Entrepreneurial leaders are wakeful to these components, and use this wakefulness to increase collaboration for the mutual benefit of the company and their employees.

Components of the metrics:
Ad hoc interaction

• Water cooler activity
• Impromptu stop in to manager’s office or other employee’s space
• Discussions at company/team meetings

Social media usage

• Employees use of which media
• Sharing best practices
• Finding best practices for use within the company

Presence management

• Stimulate and enhance social interaction
• Which users are online
• How long on-line
• Effectiveness on-line
• How much time spent on the phone
• How effective is time spent on the phone
• How much time spent in-person
• How effective is time in-person

Group Knowledge

• Access to documents, data, information, and people
• Time to search for the above
• Success of search (number of searches before correct info is retrieved)
• Storage of knowledge (who, what, when, how, where, and why)
• Categorized by variables needed to retrieve knowledge

Processes

• Time to create process change
• Flexibility
• Documentation
• Effectiveness measured

Decision Making

• Time to make decisions
• Monitoring of success
• Time from decision to action