Two focuses of my blog are Organizational/Management Discussions and Workplace Discussions. No matter what kind of organization you’re running, some form of teamwork will be involved. It’s thus critical to understand how to maximize this central component. The following contributed post is entitled, 4 Ways To Improve Teamwork Within Your Company.
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How well your team performs, and their output directly impacts how successful and profitable your company is. But you already know that. What you might not know is how to ensure that your team works cohesively and efficiently together to help you improve what you do and get better results.
Regardless of what industry you’re in, if your team isn’t gelling, then you need to do something about it. These tips are tried and tested methods of improving teamwork within the business environment to help you support your business.
Improve Leadership Communication
You’ve likely heard the phrase, “People leave people, not jobs”, and to some extent, this is true. If people aren’t leaving for a promotion or complete career change, they’re potentially leaving your organisation due to a poor experience with the people you employ. If there are any issues with your communication from management, team leaders, department heads, etc., this will trickle down to your employees and make things harder than they need to be.
Utilise communication tools within your company to help leaders communicate better and ensure that everyone has the training they need on how to engage with the team for the best results. Investing in management coaching, such as that offered by Specialist ICF Executive Coach Training & Coaching Services, can be a good idea to help you improve your leadership skills, too.
Social Events
The more your team members know about each other, the more they can relate and build a bond. This is not always possible in a working environment; however, before you go booking in for team-building events, stop. The key to building better relationships isn’t forcing them to go on weekends to participate in trust exercises; it’s about allowing them to engage in their own way in less formal situations. Voluntary social events are the way forward, not forced team-building exercises.
Recognition Programs
A great way to increase teamwork and collaboration is to introduce recognition programs and benefits for the teams that perform well and hit their targets. Regardless of if you split your employees into smaller teams or have them all working together in a small company, introduce a way to celebrate their achievements within the company to recognise their efforts and thank them for performing well. Teams who work well together will continue to produce good results, and those who don’t will see what can happen if they do well and strive to deliver results, too. This can be ideal if you have remote teams or frontline workers who aren’t always around and can feel left out of the office team and culture.
Assign Roles
If people know their part explicitly and what each other is doing, they will be able to be more efficient than those teams who are simply left to muddle through and are unclear about each other’s job roles.
This means having clear organisational processes, i.e. touchpoints for people to get assistance or hand over aspects of their workload as they progress. Let’s say the business manager brings a new client on board, but what happens next so they can process the order? This is something you need to have in place so your team doesn’t lose momentum because they don’t know what happens next or who to go to if they need assistance.
Improving teamwork and collaboration is vital within a business to help you get more from your team and ensure that the output and standards you expect are met and things are running as needed. These tips can help with that.
