What is collaborative work?
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- Collaborative work is a way of working that makes mutual aid and teamwork the cardinal value of a team: working better together.
- It rests on pooling goals, knowledge, resources and tools, and puts employees on an equal footing.
- It is neither coordination, where individual pieces of work fit together, nor cooperation, where a task is cut into parts: collaboration produces a shared outcome that no single member would have produced alone.
- It happens on site as well as remotely, at the same moment as well as asynchronously: the collaborative tool replaces the shared room, not the commitment of the people.
- Teamwork, collaborative working and working collaboratively are neighbouring expressions that do not cover exactly the same ground.
Collaborative work here, collaborative work there. You hear about it everywhere. What should we actually put behind those two words? You have come to the right place.
This page holds the definition: what collaborative work is, what sets it apart from cooperation and coordination, and the forms it takes inside a company today. For putting it into practice, we point you to the articles that cover that in detail.
Collaborative work: what is it?
Collaborative work is a way of working that makes mutual aid and teamwork the cardinal value of a team, so its members can easily cooperate towards a common goal. In short, the definition of collaborative work can be summed up in three words: “working better together”.
Working together rests above all on the pooling of values, projects, knowledge, resources and tools. Skills are shared so the team can move forward better in concert, and everyone contributes something.
In essence, and so that everyone feels involved, collaborative work puts employees on an equal footing and tends to flatten hierarchies. Include everyone, leave no one on the sidelines: that is the basis. It does not mean hierarchy disappears, but that it stops being the only route through which information and decisions travel.
With collaborative work, gone is the world where everyone toils in their own corner and presents the outcome at the weekly meeting. Projects involve several people and are accessible in real time, following a logic of open information and transparency.
Collaborating, cooperating, coordinating: three words that do not say the same thing
The three terms are used interchangeably in everyday conversation, yet they describe three different degrees of commitment. It is the most useful distinction to work out whether a team genuinely collaborates or simply crosses paths tidily.
| Way of working | What is pooled | What the team produces |
|---|---|---|
| Way of workingCoordination | What is pooledA schedule, a set of rules and an order of play | What the team producesIndividual pieces of work that fit together without clashing |
| Way of workingCooperation | What is pooledA task cut into parts and handed out | What the team producesThe sum of the parts, each person owning their own |
| Way of workingCollaboration | What is pooledA goal, knowledge, resources and tools | What the team producesA shared outcome that no single member would have produced alone |
A team can perfectly well coordinate its calendars and cooperate on a file without ever collaborating: as long as the outcome remains the sum of separate contributions, it is cooperation. Collaboration starts when the outcome can no longer be attributed to one person.
It is also why collaborative work cannot be decreed by installing a tool. It presupposes a layer underneath it: explicit roles, known decision-making scopes, a shared direction. When that layer stays implicit, pooling a goal produces meetings rather than a shared outcome, with everyone waiting to find out who gets to arbitrate. Collaborative work is therefore as much a matter of an organisation’s structure and governance as of the goodwill of its teams or the tools it buys.
Collaborative work, collaborative working, working collaboratively
The neighbouring expressions do not cover exactly the same ground:
- Teamwork: names the frame, a stable group sharing a scope. A team exists even when its members work on their own.
- Collaborative working: the practice seen from the outside, often used for a one-off arrangement between two people, two departments or two organisations.
- Working collaboratively: the verbal form, which describes a behaviour rather than a system.
- Collaborative work: the way of working itself, with its practices, its rules and its tools.
The forms collaborative work takes
The trend towards collaborative work is closely tied to the rise of a whole family of tools. Collaborative ones, too: digital workplaces, collaborative tools, enterprise social networks, shared storage spaces and online calendars. Put together, these tools widened what the expression covers.
Inside an organisation, collaborative work plays out along two axes:
- Place. Sharing an office is no longer a condition. The American company Buffer describes itself as a fully remote team scattered around the world. Collaborative tools remove geographical boundaries and make it possible to keep collaborative work going at a distance.
- Time. Part of the work happens at the same moment (a meeting, a workshop, an instant conversation), part of it asynchronously, with each person contributing when it suits them to a shared document or thread. A team spread across time zones lives mostly on the second.
That second axis is what separates today’s collaborative work from yesterday’s weekly meeting: information is published once and stays available, instead of being delivered at a given moment to whoever happened to be in the room.
Going further
With the definition settled, each next step has its own article on the blog:
- What collaborative work brings to an organisation: 5 advantages of collaborative work.
- How to put it in place, step by step: how to develop collaborative work in companies.
- What gets in its way, and the limits to anticipate: collaborative work, what are the challenges for companies.
- How to make it hold at a distance: 7 tips for effective collaborative working at a distance.
- Which tool to choose: 20 collaborative tools to improve employee productivity and what a collaborative platform is.
In closing
One sentence to keep: collaborative work is a way of working in which the team produces together an outcome that no one would have produced alone. Everything else, the tools, the rituals, the roles, follows from there.
Collaborative tools are a particularly effective way to begin the shift, provided you pick the right one. If you are considering setting one up in your company, talk to the Talkspirit team: they will help you frame your project and take it in the right direction 😉
Author: Paul Maubareyt
FAQ
It is a way of working that makes mutual aid and teamwork the cardinal value of a team, so members can easily cooperate towards a common goal. The definition can be summed up in three words: working better together.
Coordination pools a schedule and a set of rules, and produces individual pieces of work that fit together. Cooperation cuts a task into parts and produces the sum of those parts. Collaboration pools a goal, knowledge and tools, and produces an outcome no single member would have produced alone.
No. It puts employees on an equal footing and tends to flatten hierarchy in the way information circulates, so that everyone feels involved. Hierarchy stops being the only route for information and decisions, it does not disappear.
No. Collaborative tools remove geographical boundaries. The American company Buffer, for instance, describes itself as a fully remote team scattered around the world.
Digital workplaces, collaborative tools, enterprise social networks, shared storage spaces and online calendars. None of them creates collaboration on its own: collaborative work cannot be decreed by installing a tool, since it presupposes explicit roles, known decision-making scopes and a shared direction.
Teamwork names the frame, a stable group sharing a scope. Collaborative working usually describes a one-off arrangement between two people, two departments or two organisations. Working collaboratively describes a behaviour. Collaborative work names the way of working itself, with its practices, its rules and its tools.
