In the fast-changing business environment, companies strive to remove organizational silos and foster collaboration for quick decisionmaking. Workplace interactions, however, are bound to create differences in opinion, passionate exchanges, and distrust or conflicts. As a result, facilitating collaborative dialogue is often complicated. It requires proper strategy and a fundamental cultural change within an organization.

This is where Collaborent steps in. It helps people and organizations navigate important decision-making processes and related conflicts. The company facilitates purposeful and goal-driven conversations that pave the way for collaborative dialogue and dispute resolution for clients. The approach is always client-centered, humancentered, and oriented toward a healthier organization in the long term.

“We go beyond traditional meeting facilitation to impact organizational culture. Our facilitative intervention services reduce the cost of conflict, increase productivity, strengthen relationships, and build individual and organizational capacity,” says Jessica Williams, founding partner and CEO of Collaborent.

Clients are empowered to resolve evolving conflicts by identifying barriers to productive change and transforming them into fresh insights and awareness. Collaborent works with private and public sector businesses, governments, and community organizations on diverse issues of varying complexity and depth of controversy. It builds the foundation for achieving practical and implementable solutions through productive engagement and communication.

Creating Dialogue to Resolve Differences

Collaborent’s team has expertise in organizational development, design, and systems dynamics to help clients implement changes and achieve peak performance. They understand that conflicts are generally perceived to have a negative impact on productivity. However, change can also be an impetus for creating innovative change to drive better organizational outcomes.

It is essential to understand the nature of the conflict to improve performance and gain efficiencies. Collaborent enables clients to avoid common pitfalls and focus on important issues involving key stakeholders. To effectuate this, the company first examines the current as-is state and then defines a desired future state. Once the disparity’s origin is identified via gap analysis, Collaborent applies its insights, expertise, and best practices to facilitate an intervention to achieve the desired goals and outcomes.

Focusing on the Market Evolution

Another challenge that Collaborent addresses revolves around attracting and retaining talent, particularly in the diversity, equity, and inclusion domain. The company ensures all voices are heard and younger generations feel engaged and valued. It also drives organizational performance, reduces costs, increases efficiencies, and demonstrates continuous improvements by applying its expertise in organizational development, design, and systems dynamics. This plays a vital role in implementing changes and achieving peak performance, especially when numerous organizations are moving from an entirely virtual environment to a hybrid setting.

Collaborent helps organizations and groups transition by providing a comfortable setting in which people can freely discuss complex topics and have their voices heard.

Better Teamwork with Communication

When it comes to people, conversation builds connections and brings out the best of their capabilities. For many high-performing organizations, the lack of collaboration, diversity, good communication skills, adaptability, clear goals and objectives, and action plans hinder their operational objectives. Collaborent leverages its highly tuned leadership coaching capabilities to drive better participation in purposeful and goal-driven conversations and processes. It applies a respectful and assertive approach to collaboration to ensure effective communication among people.

The company offers informal processes like collaborative problem-solving, facilitation, team building, coaching, and strategic consulting. In addition, Collaborent provides more formal processes like the mediation of negotiations, agreements, workplace matters, grievances, formal complaints, and litigations.
Collaborent also coaches individuals and teams to participate collaboratively in problem-solving and navigate relational conflict. It determines whether the source of the conflict is interpersonal, structural, cultural, or data-driven, or stems from a difference in values, interests, or communication styles. Collaborent strives to create working relationships that support people’s ability to feel confident and work on issues and concerns, knowing they will be respectfully heard and addressed. This prevents problems from unnecessarily escalating into full-blown conflicts.

“The goal is to transfer and embed our expertise within the organizational culture in a way that helps them meet future needs, create opportunities, and capitalize on them. By improving organizational health and capacity and developing people through programs, Collaborent makes a difference within the organizations it serves,” says Williams.

Applied Excellence in Every Endeavor

Collaborent recently helped a large multinational company that was undergoing significant restructuring. The executive committee faced difficulties in collaborating and reaching a consensus. They sought Collaborent’s help to unite everyone.

To address this, it engaged in pre-work, conducting individual interviews with each executive committee member to understand their goals and objectives for the restructuring. Members were then given an assignment; they had to separate themselves from their positions and become co-creators of a restructuring plan. Their work yielded a consensual plan—one that was alive and evolvable— and that could be fine-tuned over time.
By taking this collaborative approach, Collaborent created a restructuring plan without the organization spending millions on a consulting company for new systems that may or may not work. The leadership team was excited about the homegrown effort, and there was consensus around the resulting plan. The approach successfully achieved a flexible, malleable, and fluid plan that could evolve with the organization over time, cutting extra costs and ensuring better outcomes.
Working closely with clients, Collaborent facilitates conversations and helps people and their organizations evolve. The company plans to continue expanding its commercial and public sector practice and is also seeking to develop its expertise in newer areas to keep up with current topics.

Collaborent aims to enhance the quality of its team by offering regular training and upskilling opportunities. This will enable the company to drive better and more expansive growth for its clients. Consequently, Collaborent ensures that all its practitioners are experts in their respective fields and capable of sharing their knowledge with clients.

Currently, the company has 200 practitioners in its team, and it plans to onboard more to meet the needs of its clients. These collaborative practitioners have high levels of skill and agility, making the team nimble and powerful. They will act as a potent agent for change to all who need their services.