Collaboration is an invaluable part of any modern business’ success, which means that teamwork is an essential skill for your staff to have. Unfortunately, teamwork isn’t always the easiest thing to achieve in the office. There are, however, ways you can promote it among your workforce. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss a few ways how.
Method One: Clarify Roles
One of the first things you should do is to ensure that everyone knows exactly what their role is with no misunderstandings. This will assist in establishing processes in which certain team members have a clear sense of what they’re responsible for and how that ties into larger goals.
There are a few direct benefits that this transparency with your team can bring. First, you can give your team ample feedback into their performance and assign them new challenges and objectives to accomplish. Secondly, you can empower your team members to approach these objectives in their own way. By giving them this power over their own process, you encourage them to take ownership over their work and the end result.
Method Two: Praise the Team
One of the biggest obstacles to true teamwork is the ego. To avoid creating interpersonal tensions amongst your team through your praise, try praising the team as a unit. While giving one member of your team the spotlight can make other members jealous, focusing that spotlight on the team as a whole will help to improve the collaborative efforts of the team. You can always praise that team member in a one-on-one conversation.
There is one caveat to this. While you shouldn’t single out a team member in public, you should make sure that all work done within the team remains transparent. This visibility will help to discourage team members from slacking off and piggybacking on their coworkers, keeping everyone accountable for their share of the work.
Method Three: Encourage Staff Socialization
In order for your workforce to act as a team, they’ll need to see themselves as a team. This can be accomplished in a few ways.
The real key is to ensure your staff is frequently spending time as a group.
In an operational sense, team meetings can be invaluable, so long as they also remain productive. Not only can these meetings provide your team with valuable facetime with one another, you can focus on your business’ strategy by analyzing your staff’s status reports side-by-side.
On the more casual side of things, there are a few ways you can draw your employees closer together. Social activities can help to build camaraderie and friendly relationships. While it might seem corny, ice breakers can be a good way to get your team to open up to one another. Your team will get to know each other better, allowing them to work together more effectively.
Method Four: Leverage Technology
Finally, if your team is going to act like a team, they’re going to need the tools that enable them to do so. This is what makes collaboration solutions so critical to the modern business. With the right solutions, your team can work cooperatively regardless of where they are.
Of course, not every team member will need to see the same documents, based on their role, which is where the capability to assign network and file access permissions comes into play. With these permissions, you can ensure that each team member can locate and access the files they need to be productive and contribute to the greater goals of the group.
Advisors Tech can help you implement these technologies to support your other team-building endeavors, as well as the success of your business as a whole. To learn what else we have to offer, give us a call at 844.671.6071.