Covid may have physically separated the teams, but the majority of marketers say they now feel more connected to managers, customers, colleagues and partners than before.

Three-quarters of marketers say the pandemic has definitely changed the way they collaborate and communicate at work, according to a Salesforce study.

But the same research also found that 69% of marketers also believe it’s harder to collaborate now than it was before the pandemic. Our point is that while it can be more difficult, it is an investment teams must continue to make if they are to be successful.

Managing multiple internal and external partners has long been a challenge for marketers, let alone juggling cross-agency team functions as well as disciplines, niche consumer targeting specialists, and more. For agencies, the situation is just as complicated as they have to put their self-interest aside and collaborate with their friends and enemies to move the client’s business forward.

To better understand collaboration in this new world, we filtered data from over 24,000 client-agency interactions to see how things have changed.

We define collaboration as “two or more people working together on the same thing”. For our database, the discipline of collaboration is an amalgamation of issues related to agency cooperation, communication and coordination with and among other partners involved in a client’s business.

For marketers, we group together questions related to how clients have an open partnership with the reviewed agency and how they motivate that agency to do their best, in a respectful and positive way. Our thinking is that if a client fosters a spirit of collaboration with an agency, they are likely to do so with and among the other partners they work with. So even though we apply different definitions, we qualify the two as “collaboration”.

Surprisingly, when we compared the 10-year movement in collaboration score that clients gave to agencies, we found very little movement. But when we correlated various functional elements that we track with the overall rating rating given by clients to agencies and vice versa, we were able to rank their relative effect. And we found that the collaboration score that agencies gave to their marketer clients had the strongest influence on the overall relationship assessment score.

As the graph below shows, that was not the case with agency client reviews, but we still see collaboration as a crucial and increasingly difficult part of building stronger relationships.

The data also established that collaboration is an essential ingredient of high performing client-agency teams, with clients highest rated for collaboration also rated highest for other attributes including process management, leadership and briefing. . Agencies rated as best at collaborating were also rated highest in areas such as media planning, digital, and account management. In short, higher collaboration scores indicate higher relationship scores overall.

For clients and agencies that lag behind in collaboration, our data showed a clear opportunity to close the 32 point gap. The data suggests that investing in improving collaboration is worth the investment.

While the Covid-induced work practices haven’t necessarily affected how marketers feel about each other, the current challenge for businesses when it comes to improving collaboration is to replicate the ‘Water cooling moment’ means the meaningful connections created between team members as a result of informal and enjoyable social micro-interactions.

Software solutions don’t necessarily replace this vital social interaction. Businesses can certainly try to introduce such moments among virtual teams with initiatives such as virtual clubs, happy hours, Zoom quizzes, and team chat apps, but we would say there is a place for them too. that face-to-face interactions resume whenever possible.

Granted, this may never happen to the same degree as before Covid. Our data shows that while 54% of workers in North America plan to return to office work, the majority of workers in Latin America (59%), Europe (53%) and Asia (60%) are considering returning to office work. future of work as hybrid or remote. job.

However, there is still an opportunity for teams to reintroduce some face-to-face interactions and the data suggests a positive advantage over collaboration. It also makes sense that teams that spend time together reap the rewards in terms of improved working relationships, better information sharing, and more commitment to a common goal.

Interestingly though, that doesn’t mean teams necessarily have to increase the number of times they check-in with each other. Our research also shows that daily recording, a side effect of the pandemic, does not improve relationships and can actually strain the mental health of workers as they feel the pressure to be ‘always active’. It’s the quality of the interaction, not the quantity, that matters. A good face-to-face meeting or interaction can be worth a dozen daily Zoom recordings.