5 Teamwork Effectiveness Models for the Modern Workplace
Teamwork is one of those topics that gets talked about a lot in business circles. Yet within the confines of the offices, it is seldom practiced properly.
If you ask both workers and management about the primary reason for failures, 86% of them will blame lack of collaboration or bad communication. On the other hand, almost half of the employees believe there isn’t enough communication in their team. Among the employers, only 18% of them take time to evaluate the quality of communication within their team, while only 5.9% of them communicate goals on a daily basis.
So, if you want to make sure you’re nurturing a healthy atmosphere in your office, turn to these tips to ensure effective teamwork in your workplace.
1. Set both personal and business goals
Work with a purpose is passion. Work without purpose is punishment. This goes both for personal and business goals. One valuable tip we can give you when it comes to establishing an effective teamwork dynamic — make sure these goals are aligned.
You should have these kind of conversations with your employees during the hiring process, and it is important to evaluate these goals periodically. Some of the questions you may want to ask include:
- Do they want to work on bigger projects?
- Do they feel more comfortable with sprints?
- Do they feel like they need more practice?
- Do they want to learn something new?
The answers will help you set the right goals that contribute both to your project’s success and your employees’ sense of professional growth and achievement. That’s how you’ll make sure that your team works towards the organizational goals with passion.
Set the SMART goals which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Writing down these goals will translate to an 80% higher chance of achieving them. Make use of an all-in-one remote collaboration software that offers clear visualization of short, mid, and long-term goals. This way, all your team members will understand their share of the work, role in the project, and prerequisites for each next step.
2. Clearly outlined roles
While plenty of entrepreneurs and business gurus have been promoting “multitasking” as the holy grail of efficiency, the actual science of our brain begs to differ. Several studies have shown that multitasking has a negative effect on productivity. It makes people less organized, decreases focus due to switching from one task to another and impairs the ability to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant details.
When it comes to teamwork effectiveness, the message is obvious — team roles should be clearly outlined and each team member should focus on one task at a time. Surely, sometimes you’ll face challenging situations where multitasking will be the only solution. However, these should be exceptions — not your everyday modus operandi.
Clear roles not only allow your employees to focus on their tasks. They also help team members hold themselves and others accountable for their part of the job. With high-quality collaboration tools, you can neatly organize your team’s roles and assign the tasks accordingly.
3. Process visualization
We mentioned the importance of writing down and visualizing your goals to improve teamwork effectiveness.
Using Kanban-style boards, you can organize your project by assigning tasks to team members, setting deadlines, and enabling communication between all team members, management, and stakeholders. While each organization member is focused primarily on their tasks, they can see their co-workers’ progress and consult with them at any moment.
While your team members should know what’s going on, it is important that they understand how it’s going on. For example, a marketing team member’s main focus is creating good content or driving traffic to your site. However, if they want to be truly good at their job, they have to understand what goes into turning an idea into a deliverable product.
Creating project roadmaps with milestones and dependencies is a great way to visualize this process in elegant, simple, yet highly effective way. Depending on the industry and project, these roadmaps can be presented in a timeline view, swimlane view, and master overview.
While the timeline keeps all team members gathered around a linear set of milestones, a swimlane view is more flexible to adapt to agile teams’ needs. swimlane view is a good fit for large organizations handling multiple departments and projects at the same time.
4. Play hard, work harder
It’s a given — good friends who nurture healthy communication and trust make a great team. If you’re not taking our word for it, here’s what Google concluded after years of studying teamwork effectiveness. Trust is what matters most.
In a business environment, this means your team members feel safe to take risks in the office. The risk can be a groundbreaking idea or simply admitting a mistake. Admittedly, building trust is not a quick or simple fix that happens overnight. It starts with recruiting team members whose strengths and weaknesses are in harmony. For this group to be effective, each member also has to be a good cultural fit for your company, espousing values and beliefs that drive your organization’s mission.
But ultimately, nurturing trust and friendship among your employees comes down to those little day-to-day things. While occasional team building cannot hurt, it’s equally important to encourage your team members to take breaks during their working hours. This is when the small, yet crucial interactions happen, creating a friendly, relaxed workplace atmosphere that builds trust.
5. Transparency
Transparency is the underlying element of all the teamwork effectiveness models we’ve mentioned so far. Setting SMART goals, assigning roles, creating project roadmaps, and building trust is all about nurturing transparency within the organization.
What we want to outline is that transparency is a two-way street. It should not flow only between team members or from team to management. It is also executives’ duty to keep their employees in the loop about things that are relevant to their projects and professional development.
Incorporating reporting features into collaboration tools allows managers and employees to analyze productivity, project costs, and duration and compare them against initial projections. This way, you can encourage a healthy discussion about future goals, current challenges, and build realistic expectations.
Final tip
If keeping everyone on the same page is the key to effective teamwork , then you can count on Nifty to help you achieve your goals. With Nifty, your entire team can rally behind your organization’s goals by seeing a transparent roadmap of their short and long term tasks to ensure you have buy-in from employees into your company’s vision.
There are no risks involved — we won’t ask for your credit card during the 14-day free trial. On top of that, our starter pack for small teams comes for free, forever. If you opt for our premium plans, you’ll have the full flexibility to upgrade or downgrade at any time, depending on your team’s structure and needs.
With features that correspond with each of these effective teamwork models, Nifty can help your team become the best version of itself! Try Nifty for free today! 🚀
