We all know that once you fully integrate effective team collaboration processes and solutions into your business, your team will be working together more effectively. The quality of their work will increase, and so will your bottom line. There is, of course, a learning curve with integrating collaboration into your business, but overcoming that will only strengthen the connections made between your teammates and the tools you are using.

But there comes a time in any collaborator's life - usually at the beginning of the heavy collaboration efforts - when they think “Can’t I just send this one file over quickly via email?”

And what happens if they do send a file through email? Well, the file is then instantly outdated, and the entire team no longer has access to it. The email could also get lost in the recipient’s cluttered inbox (or worse, in their spam folder), and if they aren’t expecting to see that file in their inbox, they won’t notice it’s there. Now, no one knows the status of that file, or the communication around that file, and it takes too long to track down.

These inefficient processes are what drove you to find a collaboration solution in the first place. Why revert back to your old ways of inefficiencies just because, in one instance, you think it may be “easier”?

When you are working hard to integrate successful collaboration into your business, work with your team to understand the reasons behind this decision. Provide specific use cases so they understand, in detail, what the issues were in the past and how collaboration systems can help improve those issues.

Also, make sure you find an online collaboration solution that is easy and fun to use. The more exciting it is and the easier it is to understand, the faster your team will accept the solution and begin using it for communicating and collaborating on everything.

And, make sure you empower your team to take control of their collaborative environment. Allow them to create the spaces in which to collaborate, and to communicate with each other about projects. And, if they ever find themselves in a situation where they’ve been emailed a file that should easily have been input into your collaboration system, allow them to authority to go back to the sender and say “Could you please upload this for me to manage versions and communication?”

You need to be dedicated to making your business a more open, collaborative and successful place. Commit to the collaboration change, and fight those urges to revert back to your old ways of working. The end results will be greater than you imagined.

How else can you encourage faster acceptance of collaboration in your business? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.