In the past, you’ve probably focused a lot of your time and effort on improving your profit turnover and establishing fruitful relationships with your customers. While these are certainly essential tasks for you to undertaking as a business owner, they aren’t the be-all-and-end-all. There are other factors that you have to take into consideration if you want to see your company be as successful as it can be — one all-important yet often overlooked factor is workspace collaboration.

If your workspace isn’t collaborative, communication will not flow around your workforce freely. As a result, miscommunication will occur, tasks will not get optimized, deadlines will be missed, and your business will no doubt suffer.

To find out how you can build a collaborative workspace, be sure to read on.

Ask your employees what they want

Whether you’re stuck for inspiration when it comes to building a collaborative workspace or not, it is always advisable to actually ask your employees what they want in this instance. This will grant you the opportunity to tailor your workspace around the wants and needs of your workforce. Ultimately, this will be sure to make them feel more comfortable to collaborate within it.

When it comes to asking your employees what it is they want from you in this sense, don’t go and dump a boring annual survey on their desk. On top of their workload, they don’t want to have to rifle through a mountain of paperwork — it’s time-consuming, and it will only ever result in either high drop rates or inaccurate information being fed back to you. Instead, you should make use of the survey software made available at www.inpulse.com. By making use of Inpulse’s patented Pulse Survey, you will be able to garner real-time insights and actionable solutions. More importantly, your staff members won’t get bored halfway through the surveying process!

Create a comfortable working environment

Both physically and figuratively, your working environment needs to be comfortable if it is to be collaborative. Your employees need to feel comforted by the aesthetics of their office surroundings, and they need to be made to feel comfortable whenever they bring a query or even grievance to your door. This will help them to relax in their working environment and, thus, be more open to collaborating with one another.

In an aesthetic sense, some of the best things you can do to make sure your employees feel comfortable in your workspace to include:

• Ensuring that the area is well-lit
• Making sure that the area is colorful and quirky
• Offering a number of amenities in the workspace, such as coffee machines
• Investing in quality seating that is both comfortable and ergonomic

In order to make your employees feel comfortable with you on a personal level, the best thing that you can do is to implement an ‘open door’ policy. Being safe in the knowledge that they can bring their ideas to you at all points throughout the working day will make your staff members feel a lot more relaxed in their surroundings. This relaxation will then be sure to breed collaboration.

If you want to see your business thrive, then you need to set about the task of building a collaborative workspace right away.