Five Essential Ways to Enhance Teamwork

No matter what industry you operate in or what service your company provides, managing your workforce is essential to success. Team members need to each have individual responsibilities and shared, common goals to help your company achieve long-term growth. A study by Stanford reported those who were primed to act collaboratively stuck at their task 64% longer than their solitary peers, whilst also reporting higher engagement levels, lower fatigue levels and a higher success rate. Teamwork is a driving force for success in businesses. Here are five essential ways to enhance teamwork in your workforce.

1. Motivate Your Team Members

Motivating your team and keeping them highly engaged with collaborative efforts goes a long way to helping your business. But how do you promote motivation in your workforce? Something as simple as recognition has been proven to be a driving force in boosting motivation. Recognized employees are happy and satisfied employees, and a feeling of being appreciated will lead to a higher quality of work.

Even still, sadly, according to a Gallup poll, 65 percent of employees report not receiving any form of recognition for their good work in the last year. Don't let your company culture be one that is known to not recognize or motivate employees so you can get the best out of your workforce.

2. Play to Their Strengths

In every team, whether it be a sports team or a company team, there are people who have designated roles and responsibilities they must adhere to. These are usually their job titles and descriptions they have because they are good at what they do. To foster the best kind of teamwork, it's important to make sure everyone on a team is designated to their specialty and what they do best.

When someone is good at something, it makes them happy to do it. Overloading team members with unbalanced workloads or expecting things they may not be well versed or trained in as well is going to hurt teamwork quality during a project. Play to your team members' strengths to keep things efficient.

3. Inspire From The Top

You want to foster an internal culture that includes teamwork and collaboration. It starts at the top of your organization and runs down. Management and leaders within your company set the tone and should lead by example when it comes to enhancing teamwork in your workforce. Define clear goals, inspire a passionate vision, and engage with team members in non-managerial positions who are working on projects to keep teamwork levels high.

4. Provide Necessary Support

Groups of human beings working together is bound to cause some sort of friction or inefficiency. One of the best ways to get around this is to make your employees' jobs as easy as possible by providing resources and support necessary for them to do their jobs.

Working with others becomes easier when things surrounding the team are already taken care of and optimized to make project completion more seamless. Whether it be granting team members the necessary software or equipment they need to do their job easier or partaking in the meetings yourself, providing the necessary support to make things easier for your team will make collaboration healthy and efficient.

5. Make Communication a Superpower

To further reduce the risks of inefficiencies when your team is collaborating, make sure communication is clear. Identify a clear, thoughtful goal and vision and present that to your team. Encourage transparency among workers and inform your team of the benefits of being transparent while on the job.

Always keep communication channels simple and open, so everyone knows where to go if there is a question, concern, or comment. Open communication is key to teamwork and ensuring team members are on the same page when it comes to projects and tasks.

Want to learn how TeamWherx™ can help your company work better as a team?