If you’ve clicked on this article, you’re likely either a manager of a team, or a part of one and wish to improve its efficiency. But wait, you have a team, its members are working on their tasks - presumably there’s teamwork in here somewhere, right? Alas, if only it was so simple… Join the Goals by KeepSolid team in exploring the ins and outs of efficient teamwork management!
Who’s responsible for teamwork
While a group of individuals may be working within the same team, and even have the same scope of tasks, it doesn’t necessarily work together, let alone smoothly and efficiently. One of the crucial factors here is the team’s leader. They need a lot of emotional intelligence and should provide a clear vision for the team. Other team members must also possess some important qualities, e.g. friction-less interaction.
Why teamwork is important
A proper teamwork system is key in our multidisciplinary world. It wasn’t always the case. During the industrial era, most jobs would include people staying behind a manufacturing line and doing one thing over and over, so teamwork would be pretty much inexistent.
Teamwork! ©GIPHY
Nowadays, however, we’re in the knowledge economy. Our jobs involve more communication and interacting with other team members, and even with specialists from different lines of profession. This makes effective teamwork pivotal for any enterprise for two reasons:
- A professional who is able to perform both together with their colleagues or employees AND as an individual will be an invaluable asset to any business. Such an employee is vital for a team attaining success and growth.
- The diverse set of skills of a team is more important for reaching success than a single jack-of-all-trades worker. Organizations should seize every opportunity to promote teamwork and to develop effective communication skills in their employees.
Top 5 benefits of teamwork
1. Unity in the workplace
Members of your team possess diverse talents, strengths, weaknesses, habits, and communication skills. Managing them can pose certain challenges if teamwork is not built correctly. When that’s the case, employees may become focused on competing against their fellow colleagues and promoting their own achievements. This leads to an inefficient, unhealthy, and toxic work environment.
On the other hand, when the teamwork system is working as intended, the whole team is motivated to work hard toward the common goal. A proper teamwork environment can promote a friendly atmosphere and foster loyalty, friendship, and a sense of satisfaction. Such relationships motivate employees, align them to deliver better results and support one another.
2. Differing feedback and perspectives
Good teamwork system provides your company with a diversity of problem-solving approaches, thought, creativity, opportunities, and perspectives. A productive team environment encourages individuals to brainstorm and work collectively, increasing their ability to solve problems and come up with more efficient and effective solutions.
Teamwork also fosters innovation and initiative, which is great for creating a competitive edge and meeting goals and objectives. Differing experiences and opinions benefit accountability and allows for a faster effective decision making. Working as a team also increases output by having multiple sets of skills and quick feedback come into play and boost your work. Designing, planning, and implementation stages can be done much more efficiently with a well-functioning team.
3. Improved productivity and efficiency
Teamwork strategies help you become more productive and efficient. They allow employees to share the workload, ensuring that tasks are completed and deadlines are met, and reducing the individual pressure. This also makes goals more attainable, optimizes performance, increases work pace, and improves job satisfaction.
Compared to one employee working alone, a group of individuals working together improves their work output and the ability to complete tasks faster. Their many minds intertwine on the same objectives, goals, and problems, allowing for strong synergy and can sometimes result in unexpected, creative solutions.
4. Learning opportunities
Specialists working as a team can learn from one another’s mistakes. This helps them learn new concepts and approaches from more experienced colleagues, or discover fresh ideas from the newer ones.
Individuals can also improve and expand their skill sets, gain insight from differing perspectives, and avoid future errors. All of this eventually leads to learning and developing more effective solutions and approaches towards the tasks at hand. Such an active employee engagement encourages innovative problem solving and better idea generating.
5. Workplace synergy
Good teamwork, mutual support, cooperation, and shared goals lead to workplace synergy. Which, in turn, makes team members collectively responsible for the outcomes achieved, helps them feel a greater sense of accomplishment, and incentivizes individuals to perform at higher levels.
Team members will share the same goals, vision, and values, when they are aware of their own roles, responsibilities, and the significance of their output. This results in a workplace environment based on cooperation, respect, fellowship, trust, and support.
10 tips to improve your teamwork
1. Set clear goals
Without a clear goal, your work will be like going on a journey without a map – reaching your destination will take you significantly more time, if you even reach it at all. You need to outline your organization’s top priorities. This requires you to step back and ask your team and yourself: “What’s the ultimate objective we have to achieve?”
Aim to define your key objectives, milestones, and teamwork goals. This will help both you and your team understand which tasks have higher priority, and see where your focus should lie.
2. Define the OKRs
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is a popular approach for setting business objectives and communicating them and their results. The method is widely adopted by various Fortune 500 companies, including Google, Intel, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zynga. All sorts of efficient teams and highly talented people turn to the OKRs.
How do you define OKRs? In short, the process will look like this:
- Define 3-5 time-bound, actionable, ambitious, and qualitative Objectives of the whole company.
- Define 3-4 measurable Key Results bound to each Objective. These should determine which concrete achievements will lead you to meeting your Objective.
- Appoint tasks (actions and activities) that are needed to reach your Key Results to individuals and teams.
Objectives and Key Results should be challenging, yet achievable and quantifiable. Once you’ve defined your team’s OKRs, make sure to write them down in the form that will be easy to review and update. This will help you keep your plans updated, and your team - remember important business metrics.
Digital planning and management tools like Goals by KeepSolid are perfect for this. They are specifically designed to showcase all the important information in a convenient and coherent form, help you keep track of the teams’ progress, and keep your OKRs relevant.
3. Redefine what’s urgent
It is important to keep to your OKRs and avoid shortsighted reactive work. However, you should also be prepared for unexpected situations. Learn to determine when the tasks are best left untackled, and when it’s an urgent crisis situation that requires your team to commit to solving the issue, drop everything else for the time being.
To redefine “urgency”, it’s worth it to remind yourself and your team of your OKRs and long-term goals. Any urgent tasks that help your business to get closer to an Objective or a Key Result should become a top priority.
4. Clarify responsibilities
When working as a team, it’s easy for the responsibilities and tasks to get mixed up or fall between the cracks. To prevent this, clarify each member’s area of expertise and responsibilities beforehand.
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With that said, projects and tasks depend largely on your Objectives, so leave some room for trial and error. When your team knows they’re allowed to approach complex problems with flexibility and creativity, they will be faster to adapt their skills and knowledge according to the situation.
5. Set clear expectations
As a team manager, you should communicate the expectations and priorities for all team members. You do not want your employees to begin their day not knowing which of their numerous tasks to do first. Efficient teamwork requires everyone to be aware of their roles and the management’s expectations. Ideally, individual contributions should be made actionable and measurable.
6. Organize your teamwork
Never leave your team’s performance to the chance. Employees will work more productively if their work is organized into clearly prioritized tasks and projects. Helping them stay organized on a personal level will encourage them to be systematic in teamwork.
7. Use a planning and management tool
A good management tool like Goals by KeepSolid will help you create, manage, and track complex projects and your team’s activities. Since it’s been designed with specific problems and uses in mind, it’s more likely to help you meet your objectives than less specialized solutions. Let alone outdated approaches like physical planning management methods (whiteboards or sticky notes) and obsolete tools like Excel.
8. Prioritize your projects and tasks
Evaluate each work, task, and project of your team. How much does it matter to your organization’s long-term success? Which task will have a bigger impact? Is it possible to dedicate your time to other tasks and projects to a better result? These insights will help you set reasonable priorities for certain tasks and activities, and ascertain that your team is aware of these priorities.
9. Do only what matters
It’s not uncommon for teams to have periods when there’s just too much work to do, and not enough time. If that’s the case, first of all, try putting all the medium-priority tasks on hold. Additionally, consider other options to make more time for top priority tasks: delegating, working extra hours, outsourcing, etc. But with any of these solutions, make sure you have enough resources for them, and that they won’t eat up even more of your time.
10. Track your progress
This tip is important if you want to find new ways to improve the outcome and quality of work. Online project and goal management software like Goals by KeepSolid makes tracking work progress an effective and simple way to plan objectives, tasks, and key results. Automated reports will be another huge benefit in this case, giving you all sorts of information about your team’s performance and workload.
