Improving collaboration in international sales organization

Abstract

This thesis examines the modern collaboration practices in remote work and improves collaboration practices in an international sales organization. In theoretical framework typical organizational and team level structures in international sales organizations are covered and building blocks for effective collaboration are examined. The development task studies existing collaboration habits in the target organization and focuses in finding practical methods to improve collaboration practices. Collaboration plays a key role in almost everything what we do in the modern work. Success of the collaboration also impacts the success of the company, and on personal level it affects how well we can accomplish our daily tasks. Practical habits have rapidly changed after the COVID-19 pandemic in many working places. Employees in many organisations, including the target organization, can now flexibly choose where they can perform their tasks best. Expectations for collaboration are constantly rising, digitalization and the rate of transformation makes businesses constantly more dependent on technical solutions but also on the workforce being capable to make the transformation happen. Meeting these demands for rising expectations and collaboration in remote work environment requires good alignment between the team members and other stakeholders. Discussions that were previously easily shared in office aisles are nowadays organized in different online platforms, where different participants have different ways of working and different expectations how they would prefer to perform various tasks. The development process consisted of three phases, in initial phase a quantitative online survey was held in August 2022, which was followed by qualitative futures workshop in September 2022 to conclude recommendations for the targeted organisation. Implementation plan for rolling out suggested changes was shared in November 2022 together with the workshop results. Feedback questionnaire was sent in December 2022 to conclude the effectiveness of the study. Purpose of the development task was to find out the current level of collaboration, describe the current collaboration practices and find the areas of improvement for effective collaboration. Based on the questionnaire the most preferred collaboration options were collaboration tools (such as Microsoft Teams®), email, and audio/video calls. Three main improvement themes were agreed as part of the workshop process: effective meeting practices (before, during, and after the meeting), availability in remote work, and reflective leadership practices. Based on the feedback the development task improved the knowledge of effective collaboration methods and similar process e.g., annually would be beneficial for the collaboration improvement.