The Necessity Of Collaboration

Seeing the team at Fowler Smith Mortgages & Protection in consistent contact with one another, sharing ideas, lender or insurer criteria and helping one another place cases is an absolute necessity, in my opinion, to ensuring that a client gets the best service possible.

Collaboration is available in person, or virtually thanks to the use of Teams and other communication apps. Seeing our incredible team of advisers and Client Account Executives sharing knowledge, ideas and solutions together in order to achieve and continue to propel the business forwards is something I'll never get tired of. I love to see the collaboration physically, more than anything – people huddling around each other whilst talking cases through. Sitting with one another and figuring out a way forwards, or the best home for a particular scenario.

Although it is absolutely possible to collaborate remotely, and it definitely does work well in our experience, there's no doubt that a good face to face, heads together set up is the best way ahead. Seeing each others scribbles and workings out in order to get to a solution.

I'm pleased that our workplace has so many spaces to allow for collaborative thinking. Not only the cluster of workspaces, but the free-flowing tables, meeting spaces and areas to sit and ponder, too. Our recent move into a larger space has definitely boosted team collaboration and I'm pleased to see it.

It has also prompted new regular gatherings too. Just recently I have hosted our first Strategy Session – where the team can gather round, or join on video-link, and share ideas, iron out potential challenges along the way and work towards implementation. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, but held off until we moved office.

What I'd love to see more of in the industry as a whole, and something that members of our team currently are trying to champion, is more peer to peer collaboration. LinkedIn is great to share thoughts and ideas, but what a world it'd be if we could pick the brains of those, perhaps, with specific knowledge in certain niches without the concern of someone trying to take an idea and run off with it.

Networking definitely allows for this, and perhaps the answer is to create more and more networking groups to prompt this industry collaboration further. Even for those who are new to industry – it could be an incredible way for them to learn from those more experienced. It isn't just advisers, either. Business owners can always benefit from rubbing shoulders with others. Discussing the dos and do nots, the what went wells and the what did nots. Administrators, accounts teams and more. Collaboration is all ways is vital.

I'm proud to see that we have an environment that allows for collaborative working. It's something I want to see more and more of as everyone in the team progresses further and further. And perhaps it's about time to build some more groups to allow for even more collaboration in the industry.

Jonathan Fowler

Founder & Managing Director