How to Increase Team Collaboration Within the Workplace

Organizations are finding it difficult to increase team collaboration across the workplace. The challenge is nudging team members to get to know each other better, have them thrive on each other for success, while increasing the communication within departments and employees. With remote employees and offices across many locations — and with 80% of the global workforce being deskless, per Emergence Capital — adapting to a collaborative team environment can prove to be a nightmare. Continue reading to learn how your workplace can maintain and improve team collaboration.

The 6 Best Ways To Increase Team Collaboration Within the Workplace:

#1: Team Building Games

First, we have team building games and activities. Team building games are one of the best and most fun ways to build new relationships or amend old ones. It could be as simple as playing a favorite team sport like basketball, football, disc golf or even a water sport. Team building activities are an effective way to teach employees how to trust one another's judgment. These activities can also contribute to more efficient communication, and most importantly can help break the ice.

#2: Streamlining The Process

Breaking down company silos allows employees to reach out with valuable suggestions that will help streamline a company's processes. This improves team collaboration and, if the proposal is implemented, can make an employee feel like they belong. Encourage brainstorming and ask your team to come up with ideas around streamlining and how to implement them. Employees lose over four hours per week switching between disconnected systems, making a unified approach a productivity necessity rather than a convenience.

#3: Use a Team Collaboration Portal

There isn't a better way to increase team collaboration than with a team collaboration software platform — specifically one that functions as a true intranet and employee experience hub rather than just a file repository. Per Social Edge Consulting, 91% of organizations operate an intranet, yet nearly a third of employees never log in to it, and only 13% use one daily. The root cause is often a platform that delivers an undifferentiated feed rather than role- and location-specific content. AI-curated personalization — surfacing the right information to the right employee automatically — is now a baseline expectation for modern collaboration platforms, not a premium add-on.

Beyond personalization, employees spend an average of 2.5 hours per day searching for information, per IDC. A well-implemented collaboration portal cuts that waste directly.

A team collaboration software solution can:

• Provide a platform to store and share files with coworkers
• Allow real-time editing to documents, ensuring every employee has the current version
• Grant simplified training to employees through videos and documents, supporting employee engagement training at scale
• Bring together employees from different departments and locations — including frontline workers who lack a company email address and are routinely excluded from standard tools, creating a two-tier workforce communication problem

Because of the collaboration platform, employees are able to converse on a day-to-day basis about various internal tasks, group activities, policy changes, project challenges, ideas, questions, and more. One large enterprise deployment achieved 90% frontline adoption within the first six months of rolling out a dedicated employee app, demonstrating what a well-implemented platform can deliver.

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#4: Improve Employee Communication

Improving internal employee communications is not something organizations have an assigned budget for. Nevertheless, it is one of the most important aspects of any organization. You could have some of the most talented individuals in the world, but without a cohesive team, an active and harmonious culture cannot be sustained. In order to improve communication, employers must entrust people to share information, challenges, feedback, and anything that will help to make work easier.

Frontline and distributed employees who lack a company email address are routinely excluded from standard collaboration tools — a gap that structured employee communications strategy must address directly. For a deeper look at how leading organizations are closing this gap, the 2026 Internal Communications Trends eBook offers current benchmarks and practical frameworks.

#5: Improving Employee Engagement

Engage employees from day one. Instead of dull PowerPoints and paperwork, start with eagerness and curiosity. Help employees get to know their co-workers by pairing them with a mentor. Familiarize them with a positive culture by creating a perfect first impression. Employee engagement courses and structured onboarding programs tied to a collaboration platform make this first impression consistent across every location and shift.

Another way to improve employee engagement is by providing the option of working from home. Give employees the freedom to work from a more comfortable environment, remove travel and traffic time, and improve accountability as well. One healthcare organization achieved 87% workforce engagement within a few months of launching a branded collaboration app — a concrete outcome worth benchmarking against. For context on what drives engagement at scale, Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace provides current data on what employees actually need from their employers.

Poor engagement is also a measurable retention risk: replacing a frontline employee costs between $4,400 and $15,000, making disconnection a financial issue, not just a culture one.

#6: Improving Team Collaboration With Interdependence

Lastly, creating a sense of community and synergy in any team is a must for success and interdependence. Employees working as an effective team thrive on each other's success. An individual or a department cannot single-handedly achieve success within a workplace. Without cooperation, communication, and trust, the most profitable companies will not be able to succeed in the long-run.

Encourage People to Socialize Outside of Work

Getting to know coworkers outside of work can boost interdependence and increase team collaboration and communication.

To learn more about how to increase team collaboration, schedule a personalized demo to see how MangoApps can help.

How Do You Measure Team Collaboration Success?

Implementing the six methods above is only half the work — knowing whether they are producing results is the other half. The most practical measurement approaches include:

• Employee engagement surveys and questionnaires: Regular employee engagement surveys give teams a structured way to surface friction, disconnection, and communication gaps before they become retention problems. Pulse surveys tied to a collaboration platform can track sentiment over time rather than capturing a single annual snapshot.
• Platform adoption metrics: Track daily active users, content contribution rates, and search query volume inside your collaboration portal. Per SWOOP Analytics, the average daily time spent using intranet tools is only six minutes — a baseline that well-configured platforms consistently exceed when content is personalized and relevant.
• Cross-departmental project outcomes: Monitor whether projects involving multiple departments are completing on time and within scope. Improvement here is a direct signal that silos are breaking down.
• Retention and absenteeism data: Because replacing a frontline employee costs between $4,400 and $15,000, tracking voluntary turnover alongside collaboration investments gives HR a clear return-on-investment signal.

For a structured framework on closing information gaps that affect measurement, see Closing the Information Gap in Performance Reviews.

What Collaboration Tools Work Best for Frontline and Distributed Teams?

Not every collaboration tool is built for teams without dedicated desks or company email addresses. The 80% of the global workforce that is deskless, per Emergence Capital, needs mobile-first, no-email-required access as a baseline — not an afterthought.

When evaluating employee engagement software and collaboration platforms for frontline or distributed teams, prioritize:

• Mobile-first design: The platform must be fully functional on a personal smartphone, not a scaled-down version of a desktop tool.
• No corporate email required: Frontline workers in healthcare, grocery, and financial services industries routinely lack company email addresses. A platform that requires one excludes the majority of your workforce from day one.
• AI-driven content surfacing: Rather than a single undifferentiated feed, the platform should surface role- and location-specific updates automatically, which is what drives the daily usage rates that generic intranets fail to achieve.
• Unified notifications: Employees switching between five or more disconnected systems lose over four hours per week to context-switching. A single unified platform eliminates that drag.

For an independent evaluation of how current platforms compare, the ClearBox Consulting's 2026 Intranet and Employee Experience Platforms Report provides analyst-level detail on what separates high-adoption platforms from low-adoption ones.

How Does Team Collaboration Connect to Employee Engagement and Retention?

Collaboration and employee engagement are not separate initiatives — they are the same initiative measured from different angles. When employees have clear communication channels, access to the right information, and tools that include rather than exclude them, engagement follows naturally.

The financial stakes are concrete: replacing a frontline employee costs between $4,400 and $15,000, and disengaged employees are significantly more likely to leave. An employee engagement survey run before and after a collaboration platform rollout will typically show the connection directly. Organizations in sectors with high frontline turnover — such as ambulatory care — have used structured collaboration programs to move engagement metrics measurably within the first quarter of deployment.

For a broader view of where workforce operations are heading and how collaboration fits into the picture, the 2026 Workforce Operations Trends eBook is a practical starting point.