Tip of the Week: Excelling at Teamwork

How well do your employees collaborate with one another? Teamwork is essential to the success of any business, but it’s often something that doesn’t come naturally to some users. These days, there are ways you can make communication and teamwork more effective and efficient for your workforce. This week’s tip is dedicated to making this work.

Clarify Your Roles
The first thing you need to realize is that everyone should know what their role is with no misunderstandings. This helps you put processes in place that can help your employees know what they are responsible for and work toward a goal.

Ensuring this level of transparency can help foster appropriate teamwork. Feedback can be provided based on the role a user plays in a project, and you can use that feedback to assign them new challenges and objectives. You can also give team members a better way to approach their objectives by providing a singular end goal to work toward, at their discretion. If you give them power over their own processes, they will begin to take ownership of them and try to work in the most effective way possible.

Praise the Team’s Efforts
Sometimes interpersonal tensions can get in the way of a team performing as it’s supposed to. In cases like this, providing the team with praise can give them the incentive needed to set aside their differences and focus on the collaborative efforts. If this is the method chosen for encouraging teamwork, it’s important that you focus the praise on the team’s overall performance rather than individual performance, as this can breed jealousy in an already volatile environment. That being said, transparency is still important, as you don’t want employees to piggyback off of others’ success when in reality they don’t accomplish anything.

Encourage Socialization of Staff
For a group of people to work as a team, they need to visualize themselves as a team. One way to expedite this process is to make sure they are spending time together as a group. Team meetings might be helpful for discussing certain tasks, but they also give your employees opportunities to interact with each other in person. Activities and other social gatherings more in the casual vein can also help build camaraderie and friendly relationships between your employees. Encourage them to take team lunches or hit a local happy hour after the daily grind. When people like their coworkers, they tend to work better, so you might be surprised by the results.

Use Technology Solutions
In order for a team to work as a team, you’ll need to provide the tools to help them be as productive as possible. With the right solutions available, your team can work together on projects whether they are in the same room or across the country. Access permissions, file sharing, and virtual private networks will all be critical to the success of these solutions.

Washington Works can help your organization implement the best collaboration solutions on the market. To learn more, reach out to us at 301-571-5040.