Deliverable 4 - Global Leadership

Communication and collaboration are vital to all organizations. Today, all businesses are using tools to help improve and encourage increased communication and collaboration amongst their teams.

Collaboration and communication are often spokes about in unison, but they are not the same thing. You can’t collaborate with someone unless you can communicate with them first. When people say that they “collaborate” with their co-workers over instant messenger, email, or video chat, what they’re really saying is that they use those tools to communicate. So, what is the difference between collaboration and communication?

Communication refers to how we connect with one another. This can be through email, voice calls, video chat, instant messenger, or even social media. Communication is about sharing information. This could mean using VoIP to call a colleague and conduct a meeting about an upcoming project or it could mean using a social tool like WhatsApp to send a message out to your staff about a new customer service strategy that you want them to implement.

Collaboration, on the other hand, is defined as the process of working with another person to achieve a common goal. When you collaborate, you align your work and actions with another person to achieve a common goal or outcome. You often collaborate with the help of collaboration tools. Collaboration tools can either be of a non-technological nature such as paper, flipcharts, post-it notes or whiteboards. Or they can include software tools and applications such as collaborative software.

Communication is the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver.

The ability to communicate via appropriate channels and proper tools is necessary for collaboration. Typically, collaboration, requires the use of various communication tools, such as; email, shared documents, instant messaging, and video conferencing.

Collaboration is working with another person to achieve a common goal.

You can't collaborate without communication, and this is why the two terms are often used interchangeable despite their difference. Communication becomes collaboration when there is a purpose and goal to accomplish.

Online Collaboration Tools

Online collaboration tools are web-based applications than can include more basic services such as instant messaging for groups, file sharing tools, and collaborative search engines (CSE) to find information distributed within the organization, community or team. The collaboration tools can also include integrated online calendars, shared online-whiteboards to organize tasks and ideas or internet teleconferencing combinations. Online collaboration tools range from being very simple to very complex depending on the organization’s need.

Collaboration with software presents itself in many different forms. It could involve bringing team members together over a shared document using Google Docs which allows them to work on the project together simultaneously. It could also mean asking people to contribute their thoughts to an online development session via WebEx so that you can improve the performance or capability of a new tool.

Communication and collaboration work closely together. Without communication, collaboration would be impossible. You can also communicate with team members all day and never actually collaborate on anything. Ultimately, collaboration can’t exist without communication and communication needs to thrive before collaboration can begin to flourish. The biggest mistake that many businesses make is trying to encourage collaboration before they’ve implemented a communication infrastructure. For example, when two or more people need to collaborate over a time sensitive project, they will need more than a document file and email account. You need to provide them both a collaborative document that can update and sync quickly and communication software where people can discuss the changes or updates they’re making. Without collaboration tools, you’d just have a group of people working on the same task separately and coming up with their own ideas and solutions.

Organizations today require that collaboration and communication exist together in harmony for business processes to be successful. Effective communication isn’t just a necessary component of collaboration, it’s a requirement of any successful business.