Collaborative work: return to the future

There is a lot of talk today about collaborative work, and we agree that working collaboratively is the biggest focus of motivation and change in organizations today. But do we really know what collaborative work is? Do we apply it well in our organizations? That’s what we intend to explore with this article.

Collaborative work is understood in many ways and applied to many contexts. In the educational context it has been talked about for a long time: exchanging the competitiveness of school and our children, for collaboration. In the work context, it became a resounding voice with the pandemic coming in, with the confinement and the need to dispel hierarchies that made no sense with people working from home. Hierarchy has become entropy when it was once guidance and supervision.

But there are many learnings and even advantages of collaborative work in organizations. The Entreprisers Project, a community that helps CIOs and leaders in technology areas with day-to-day work challenges, tells us how we can use remote and collaborative work to generate empathy, but above all to reinvent ways of being, thinking, challenging colleagues and even the culture of the organization. All of course, for the sake of well-being and overall success. And the truth is that we can and should reinvent our work life for the sake of wellness and well-being.

For UnikSystem the pandemic was (and is) challenging. However, it was time to put ourselves on the other side (empathy) and think how we could facilitate the work of leaders and managers of people and organizations to be able, in a simple and intuitive way, to contact more and better and above all do not disperse efforts and work. And so, we developed an Employee Portal that, more than an aggregator of collaborative tasks, facilitates work and minimizes the constant effort of keeping human resource related tasks up to date. Thus, we consider this Portal as an aggregator and facilitator.

Onboarding, with our Employee Portal, is no longer a process that only involves a company department and the employee. It is a multidimensional process since it actively involves the company, the employee (and here we combine collaborative work tools as well as building autonomy and self-responsibility for their journey within the company) and their colleagues.

And onboarding should be just like that: continuous. Because every day we do onboarding in the company and on a new workday. Every day we do onboarding in the lives of the people on the team and those people do onboarding in our lives. If there is an Employee Portal to facilitate it, so much the better!

Administrative work is usually the Achilles’ heel of many people. In fact, bureaucracies, although necessary, are capable of disrupting a regular workday. Indeed, administrative and procedural skills are very necessary, as Indeed, one of the largest job portals in the world, points out to us, but they do steal a lot of time.

Because we know this reality very well, we created an Employee Portal that simplifies HR administrative work, streamlines processes, while at the same time aggregates and communicates internally so that the team’s work levels, and performance is a strength for the company.

Being able to manage vacations, overtime work, absences among other tasks within the Portal, makes management within the company and within the teams as rigorous, fair, and transparent for all parties involved and to speak of People Management is to speak of these principles and values: rigor, fairness, transparency and equity. And it is these values that we have in mind when we extend the Employee Portal and develop it.

Performance appraisal is a key moment in the life of companies and organizations. In the past it has been done in a very unilateral way, solely by managers, but in recent times it has become more dynamic. Since 2020 we have seen a major evolution in terms of performance evaluation: it has become collaborative, closer, and more focused (an attribute that remote work has brought to many areas of many organizations: focus).

360-degree performance appraisals are too exhaustive (and strenuous), and we question whether they are practiced with the exacting requirements needed to be successful. What we do know is that with the Employee Portal, performance appraisal within companies and organizations becomes broader and more successful. And all we need to improve and energize a company well is to know the human capital it has internally and how this human capital adds value. This is done with a good performance appraisal.

We believe we have a very complete solution for your company or organization. Our Employee Portal has a series of features that are the mainstays of our day-to-day work to simplify processes, fine-tune processes, and complete tasks and procedures.

However, every company has a DNA. Each company is unique. Every company has its own unique way of working. We are known for our good understanding of companies and organizations, and their various levels of complexity and functioning.
In this way, we meet your needs. Beyond what we have included in the Employee Portal, let us understand what you need most, and we will make you a good proposal.

We simplify your work. We make your work more intuitive. And that’s what we do best: because we are a collaborative company, we collaborate with you too!

Contact us. We are always here.

by Ricardo Barros – Chief Customer Success Officer @Uniksystem