How do some teams work so well together, while others struggle to improve teamwork?
It’s a question common among companies, team leaders, and employees who struggle with invisible workloads. Perfecting the concept of teamwork, or even just improving it, creates a domino effect that’s beneficial for your bottom line. However, failing to capitalize on excellent teamwork can set your goals on fire.
So, how can you guarantee teamwork is part of your company culture from day one? To help you with this task, we’ve rounded up some proven hacks for creating a cohesive, happy, and effective team — whether it’s large, small, virtual, or in-office.
In this article, you’ll learn what ideal teamwork is, its role in the workplace, and its importance. Not only that, you could fill your mind with ways to improve collaboration and push your company beyond its potential after reading this.
Why Is It Important To Improve Teamwork?
With everyone on the same page, teamwork creates an atmosphere of harmony. Working together improves efficiency, productivity, and overall job satisfaction. Coherent teamwork motivates members to perform at their best as well.
Effective teamwork creates a high-performing team. With this group of people working together collaboratively, your bottom line is easier to reach. Plus you get unneeded stress off your shoulders.
Keep in mind that as a business owner, a team leader, or a manager, you’ll have a lot on your plate and may have to attend to multiple things at once. However, if you have a productive team working together, you’ll have less to think about. Difficult tasks will be easier to manage and long-term team projects are easier to handle.
Here’s why improving teamwork is a must to achieve your organization’s long-term goals:
A. It Builds Up Workforce Morale
Effective teamwork contributes to employee engagement at your company – crucial for lower turnover and overall business growth.
You boost your team’s morale by working with them on creating a career map. If your members know they’re part of your plans, they will be more motivated to work hard and stay with you.
B. Less Burnout Or Stress
Teamwork means more people share the workload, making it easier for everyone on the team to focus on their tasks without feeling overwhelmed. This helps avoid excessive stress and job burnout.
As the team leader, there are a couple of ways to make your employees’ working environment more stress-free, such as:
C. Better Employee Retention
A working environment that makes your team feel respected, valued, and trusted, will make its members stick around – it’s not just about money anymore. Teamwork helps improve employee retention and also lowers costs.
When employees stay, you don’t have to go through the whole hiring and onboarding process again. It creates consistency, better customer service, a more skilled workforce, a stronger team dynamic, and an improved corporate culture.
D. Increased Autonomy
Teamwork fosters a trusting environment. It provides team members more freedom to do their work and in making decisions. It gives them more ownership of their work, leading to satisfaction.
Giving more freedom allows them to be accountable for their actions. With employees being honest about mistakes or other factors early on, finding a solution can become easier without disrupting the timeline for achieving goals.
E. Improve Innovation And Creativity
When everyone bands together, they can intellectually stimulate each other. Successful teams with collaborative behavior are also better at finding solutions and more likely to succeed under pressure. One team member might suggest gamified pop ups to increase conversions and another will suggest conducting customer satisfaction surveys for customer retention. Some will consider the pros and cons of these questionnaires.
Overall, there will be creativity plus a check and balance of ideas. Teamwork aids in establishing a stable learning environment. When people are exposed to new ideas, they begin to think more broadly about their ideas.
With the benefits in order, you surely want to experience them for your team. Here are 11 ways you can try to help your team be more productive.
11 Ways To Improve Teamwork For A More Productive Team
When you have several people working on the same project, keeping everyone on the same page can be challenging for managers and team leaders.
And yet it’s something that all leaders face at some point in their careers: how do we get these people to work together and hone a culture of trust and collaboration?
Follow these proven strategies, and you’ll have a cohesive team in no time.
1. Set Clear Goals
As mentioned, teamwork is about employees working together to achieve shared goals. If those aren’t clear, the project falls apart. As the team leader, it’s up to you to sit them down and explain project objectives or long-term and organizational goals. Provide an outline and highlight the top priorities.
Fortunately, you could use the SMART framework when developing team goals. The image below shows what this framework means. But to make it more understandable, we’ll give you an example.
Let’s say you want to generate new creative designs for a season-sensitive and niche-specific product like a KN95 face mask. There are plenty of ways to do this, and one of them is to be clear with the bottom line. Here’s how you incorporate a SMART goal to guarantee your team members have clarity on what you want to achieve:
- Specific: Creative design is a broad subject. Focus on a precise issue, like improving purchases.
- Measurable: Measurable goals must be linked to a metric that allows you to track them. In this case, it can be the number of purchases, add-to-carts, or eCommerce store visits.
- Actionable: You can provide tools or suggest websites to boost creativity.
- Realistic: Don’t just come up to your team and say you want unlimited design ideas. Give them specifics. How many ideas to generate and possibly, design categories.
- Timebound: Give the team a reasonable date when you want to see a spike in conversion rates. Set incremental weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals.
Hence, your SMART goal should look something like this: Our common goal is to increase facemask sales by 20% within the next quarter by generating a steady flow of designs (at least 10 designs/week) to offer to consumers.
2. Communicate Proactively, Not Reactively
Keeping communication consistent among your members is crucial to improving teamwork. Set team meetings, establish communication platforms, update each other when reaching milestones, and encourage them to speak up.
Don’t just meet up when a problem arises. Frequent communication is key for a teamwork environment to flourish especially when handling an eCommerce store where you need to rely on overseas sourcing firms because you aren’t in control of most elements in the workflow.
Especially for industries like this, you need to meet and plan for an eCommerce help desk like what ReplyDesk offers to address customer concerns promptly if ever they arise.
Poor communication leads to misunderstandings and workplace conflicts. That’s why communication platforms are powerful tools you could maximize to improve teamwork. Try using Slack, MS Teams, or Skype.
By using any of these tools, you can make the communication between members of your team more open, constant, and seamless.
4. Recognize And Reward Teamwork
A simple thank you or acknowledgment goes a long way to celebrate team success. When you recognize good teamwork, you’ll see improvements in how they work together. When you give people credit for a job well done, it encourages them to do their best work; they’ll want to be recognized again.
Though you have to be careful not to play office politics by picking a favorite. Favoritism creates a negative impact and will make the teamwork you’ve built crumble. Hence, you have to create a transparent system for the rewards so employees know everything is fair and square. This involves creating a robust record of performance information. For this, you can leverage data capture systems so don’t have to manually keep track of employee milestones.
In terms of rewards, developmental opportunities are one of the best things you can offer the team. If you’re a marketing agency, you could enroll them in digital marketing