The Value of Teamwork and Collaboration in the Digital Age!

7 min readAug 21, 2023

The foundations of any successful company are teamwork and collaboration. An organization will succeed when employees work together to achieve a shared goal. They can combine their talents and lend a hand each time they need it.

A workplace that encourages collaboration and teamwork reaps many benefits. These include:

Enhance your creativity
Ideas can be executed faster
It creates a feeling of community
Increases employee morale and productivity
Leading to personal and professional growth
Problem-solving is faster

And much, much more.

It is not an idea to say that teamwork and collaboration are important. Numerous studies show the impact of teamwork and healthy collaboration on an organization’s bottom line. Here are some impressive statistics:

A sense of belonging, (great colleagues, achieving milestones, and a shared mission), is cited by 54% of workers as a reason they stayed at an employer longer than it was best for them.
Around 75% of employers consider teamwork and collaborative work to be “very important”.
Employees and managers cite ineffective or lack of communication as the reason for failure at work.
99.1% of people prefer to work in an environment where issues are discussed honestly and openly.
Companies with good communication have a 50% lower turnover of employees.
According to 33% of employees, the ability for them to work together makes them feel more loyal.
A lack of honest and open communication is the biggest factor that negatively impacts employee morale, according to 33%.
Working with an excellent team is the primary reason 37% of workers stay.

Technology is changing how we perceive teamwork in the workplace.

We can transform our work by changing how we interact and communicate.

The technological advances have been staggering. Teamwork and collaboration are difficult in this digital environment that is constantly evolving.

The Impact of Teamwork on Technology

Our lives are being impacted by technology in every way. Smartphones, laptops and tablets, smartwatches and speakers have become more sophisticated. Even our refrigerators! The workplace is not any different.

Technology has impacted every aspect of the business world. From HR to customer service and raising funds for your company, it’s now used in everything.

Your office is where you choose to work. A co-working area like WeWork, can also be your favourite coffee shop. There are no clear boundaries between an office and a place to do work.

The norm is remote working. Telecommuting is now the norm.

Thanks to increased productivity and the lack of travel time, more and more workers are working from home or in a café.

empowers employees so they can work wherever and whenever they choose. Automattic, which is the company that created WordPress, shut down its San Francisco 15,000 square foot office, because their employees did not show up. Automattic offers its employees $250/month to be spent on coffee or co-working space.

It’s easy to understand that the technology infiltrating our workplace will only increase.

The digital revolution and technology have changed the game. This has led to new challenges for organizations.

The Challenges of Teamwork in the Digital World

The inability to communicate, sit down, and talk face-to-face can result in a team that is disorganized. This problem is made more complex by remote workers who operate in different time zones.

It can be difficult to access information, such as documents, files, and important media if your company still uses paper-based documentation.

To a certain extent, storing documents and files on the cloud may help to solve this problem. Sharing multiple links to cloud services with your employees, and ensuring that the correct employee is given access to information in the cloud can be a lengthy process.

The deployment of tasks, to-dos, and other items can be a major problem. It often leads to confusion. Employees who can’t view what their colleagues are doing lead to inefficiency and redundancy.

Another huge obstacle in the digital workplace is communication. Email fails quickly because we depend on it so much. Email is the least effective tool for sharing information and storing knowledge. Once the recipient has consumed the information, it is incredibly difficult to locate the same.

This transfer of information is not available to anyone outside the thread of an email. The same information is shared more than once when it’s needed, which adds to the email overload.

Although technology is a great tool for improving productivity in the office, there are still limitations to its use when working in teams or collaborating.

In the past decade, many digital tools for collaboration have been developed, which help employees to solve problems associated with digitization, and promote healthy collaboration.

The importance of teamwork in collaboration

In recent years, the adoption of digital collaboration tools (software and apps) has increased significantly.

In this digital age, businesses are seeking ways to establish collaborative practices. This is especially true since 91% of those who work at home believe that they can be more productive when working from their homes.

The software helps employees collaborate with technology and digital devices. Alfresco’s survey of 753 professionals found that 83% of them rely on technology for collaboration.

Nearly 82% also said that they felt impacted by the loss of this collaboration technology.

The digital tools for collaboration not only facilitate communication, but also provide the means to manage and create content and increase employee productivity.

It also allows companies to operate beyond geographic boundaries as well as regular working hours.

These tools have a wide range of advantages in the office. We’ll see what impact they have on businesses, and how this can help to foster a culture that encourages teamwork and collaborative work.

#1. Working from home is possible

These digital collaboration tools would not have made remote work possible. Software and apps are available for video conferencing and document collaboration. They can also be used to hold meetings, share documents and brainstorm ideas. Data shows that it works:

Over 77% of remote workers report higher productivity, and 52% take less time off.
Around 91 percent feel more productive when working from home than in an office.
Remote workers are able to get more work done with fewer interruptions, such as meetings, noisy coworkers, or conversations.

Remote work would not have succeeded if it wasn’t for digital tools. It’s chaos, rather than order.

#2. Improvements in Internal Communication and Collaboration

McKinsey reports that knowledge workers dedicate an average of 14% of the workweek to internal communication and collaboration.

This study showed also that social tools can help increase productivity by up to 20–25 percent. It is a huge achievement, especially when you consider that over 300 hours are wasted each year in office communications.

People can’t wait to receive an email response, and they don’t want it lost in their inbox.

The use of newer and faster communication tools, such as instant messages or real-time collaborative tools has improved communication within the company.

Collaboration tools provide a space where all your colleagues can know about what is happening in the business, thereby improving inter-departmental relations.

#3. Increased Productivity

The use of digital collaboration tools allows employees to save time and focus on more valuable activities.

Remote work, made possible by these collaboration tools, allows employees to save time on their commute to and from the workplace. Oh, that “work-life” balance.

A digital collaboration system allows for quick access to the content or information you need, without having to disturb other workers’ workflow. These factors combined improve employee morale and office productivity.

#4. Access to information

We all waste a lot of time searching for information. You can search for information in Dropbox or in your file cabinet, and you may also be searching through an infinite list of folders in the desktop.

All of this leads to a huge waste in time. Data shows that employees waste almost 20 percent of their time searching for the information they need to complete their tasks. That’s one full day of work per week.

The collaboration tools ensure that every employee can access the information needed, at any time, and improve workflows.

#5. Improves Team Interaction

By providing multiple ways for employees to communicate, collaboration tools improve the team’s interaction.

Skype and Microsoft Teams make it easy to connect geographically dispersed teams via video, text or call.

The tools available allow you to stay in constant contact with colleagues, improve communication amongst staff and foster better relations between departments.

#6. Knowledge Management

IDC’s data indicates that knowledge workers spend about 2,5 hours per day or 30% of their workday searching for information.

A company with 1,000 employees wastes between $2.5 and $3.5 millions per year by searching for information that is not available, unable to locate existing information or recreating it!

Knowledge management tools, such as collaboration software, allow companies to store both internal and externe documents in a safe place. They can also be used for training future employees by documenting the knowledge of senior managers.

This way, knowledge from the company doesn’t leave with the employee. This allows your employees, both current and future, to have access to this information.

Knowledge management tools are essential because 44 percent of workers have a poor or poor ability to transfer knowledge.

#7. Improved Business Operations

Social collaboration tools are used by up to 80 percent for improving business processes.

These multi-featured software tools enable team members to be always in the loop about what is happening within the business and the plan for the future.