How we work together now: why collaboration matters

Covid might have kept teams apart physically, but the majority of marketers say they now feel more connected to managers, customers, colleagues and partners than before

According to research from Salesforce, a full three-quarters of marketers say the pandemic has permanently changed how they collaborate and communicate at work.

But the same research also revealed that 69% of marketers also think it’s harder to collaborate now, than it was before the pandemic. Our view is that although it might be harder, it’s an investment teams must continue to make if they want to succeed.

Managing multiple internal and external partners has long been a challenge for marketers, not to mention juggling inter-agency team functions as well as disciplines, niche consumer targeting specialists, and more. For agencies the picture is equally complicated as they must put self-interest aside and collaborate with friend and foe, to drive the client’s business forwards.

To better understand collaboration in this brave new world, we filtered through data from more than 24,000 client-agency interactions to see how things have changed.

We define collaboration as ‘two or more people working together on the same thing’. In terms of our database, the collaboration discipline is an amalgamation of questions related to the agency’s co-operation, communication and co-ordination with and among the other partners involved in a client’s business.

For marketers, we cluster together questions related to the way clients foster an open partnership with the agency under evaluation, and how they motivate that agency to deliver their best, in a respectful and positive way. Our thinking is that if a client fosters a collaborative spirit with one agency, they’re likely to do so with and among the other partners with which they work. So even though we apply different definitions, we label both as ‘collaboration’.

Surprisingly, when we compared the 10-year movement of the collaboration score clients gave agencies, we found very little movement. But when we correlated various functional elements we track with the overall evaluation score clients gave agencies and vice versa, we were able to rank their relative effect. And we found that the collaboration score agencies gave their marketer clients had the strongest influence on the overall relationship evaluation score.

As the chart below shows, this wasn’t the case for client evaluations of agencies, but we still see collaboration as a crucial and increasingly challenging part of building stronger relationships.

The data also established collaboration as a vital ingredient of high-performing client-agency teams, with the clients rated highest on collaboration also rated higher on other attributes including process management, leadership and briefing. Agencies rated as better on collaboration were also rated higher on areas including media planning, digital and account management. In short, higher collaboration scores point to higher relationship scores overall.

For those clients and agencies lagging behind on collaboration, our data showed a clear opportunity to close the gap by 32 points. The data suggests that investing in improving collaboration is an investment worth making.

Whilst working practices brought on by Covid haven’t necessarily affected how connected marketers feel to one another, the current challenge for companies when it comes to improving collaboration lies in replicating the ‘water-cooler moment’, the meaningful connections created between team members as a result of informal, enjoyable social micro-interactions.

Software solutions don’t necessarily replace this vital social interaction. Companies can certainly try to introduce such moments among virtual teams with initiatives like virtual clubs, happy hours, Zoom quizzes and team chat apps, but we’d argue there’s also a place for face-to-face interactions to resume where possible.

Admittedly these may never happen to the same degree as pre-Covid. Our data shows that whilst 54% of workers in North America anticipate returning to office work, the majority of workers in Latin America (59%), Europe (53%) and Asia (60%) forsee the future of work as hybrid or remote working.

However, there is still scope for teams to reintroduce some face-to-face interactions and the data suggests a positive benefit on collaboration. It also makes intuitive sense, that teams that spend time together, will reap the benefits in terms of improved working relationships, better information sharing and more commitment to a joint goal.

Interestingly though, this doesn’t mean that teams necessarily need to ramp up the amount of times they check in with one another. Our research also shows that checking in daily, a side-effect of the pandemic, doesn’t lead to improved relationships and can in fact put a strain on the mental health of workers as they feel the pressure to be ‘always-on’. It’s the quality of the interaction, not the quantity, that counts. One good face-to-face meeting or interaction can be worth a dozen daily Zoom check-ins.