To stand out among your competitors, you need a strong team. A-players. Die hards.
You might have that already, but are they synced? How do they perform together?
Regardless how good individualy they are, if they're not working together, you have a bunch of high functioning silos and taking a responsibility of managing all that takes vast amounts of energy.
So how to encourage teamwork and collaboration in your organization to ensure maximum efficiency and highest level output?
These 11 proven strategies are your key to success.
1. Build Strong Leadership
Since managers determine up to 70% of the variance in team engagement, it’s essential that you have leaders who know how to:
- build and foster a culture based on trust, teamwork, and communication,
- assign team roles and responsibilities based on individual skills and abilities,
- provide guidance and means to achieve goals,
- support, motivate, and inspire the team,
- set quality expectations and act as role models.
Run employee surveys, assessments, and personality tests to learn more about the role you and other leaders play on your teams. With this, you can develop a plan to support your growth.
For example, you can sign up for a leadership program, such as Oxford’s Executive Leadership Development Program, a Coursera online course, or a local workshop on leadership.
2. Set Up Healthy Communication Standards
For a workplace culture based on open communication, trust, and teamwork, you need to set up appropriate communication standards. These should include your company values and vision, your communication policies, channels, company rules, conflict resolution, and other strategies.
Your guidelines should be a concise document with specifics promoting a healthy and collaborative environment where everyone has a voice. It’s best to keep your guidelines in one place, available to all your team members.
If you’re using a collaboration tool such as ActiveCollab, you can keep all relevant files in there, so that new hires can access them from day 1.
Speaking of collaboration tools…
3. Use A Proper Team Collaboration Tool
Without the right tools, your teams might struggle with workload, communication, and time management. This will directly impact your business results and discourage teamwork.
For your teams to work together more effectively, get an all-in-one collaboration tool. Help your teams streamline their tasks, communication, and resources for maximum productivity and teamwork.
ActiveCollab, for example, is entirely designed to support team collaboration – with its team collaboration and communication feature, teams and management feel the difference esspecially in the quality levels of teams' output.
Your teams can check in, brainstorm, distribute tasks, and track progress without having to switch tabs or change their devices. This not only makes work easier but also facilitates teamwork.
Not sure about it? Try our 14 day free trial, or book a demo and let us show you around!
4. Provide Soft-Skill Training Opportunities
With a strong set of soft skills, your employees will improve social interactions and performance at work. They’ll better deal with challenges and conflicts, organize their time and workload, and connect and collaborate with others.
Assess their soft skills to identify skill gaps among your teams and decide which soft skill training to provide.
You don’t have to spend too much on workshops or coaches. A more cost-effective and convenient solution would be an e-learning platform. They offer impressive collections of employee teamwork training courses and often a gamified experience for your employees to enjoy while learning.
5. Consider Advanced Leadership Rotation Programs
Rotational leadership programs let leaders explore different business areas, challenge their status quo, and acquire skills that will help them strengthen their impact as team leaders.
During the program, your leaders will exchange opinions, ideas, and experiences that will help them improve their leadership styles and learn how to better motivate and support their teams.
If you’re looking to add more dynamics to your rotational program, you can organize role-playing, mentorship, and group learning sessions. These activities could be an excellent way for your leaders to improve their own relationships, too.
6. Make Room for Peer-to-Peer Learning
Peer-to-peer learning activities help teams develop their cognitive abilities, relationships, and a sense of belonging. By transferring their know-how in a less formal way, your employees will feel more engaged and confident to contribute and work as a team.
You can organize discussion groups, mentorship and coaching programs, job shadowing, joint projects, peer-to-peer performance reviews, and even casual lunch get-togethers.
These social interactions will help you maximize everyone’s potential and create an optimal, collaborative environment for people to thrive.
You can even do it in-house. In ActiveCollab, you can easily manage such projects with multiple-task participants, discussions, team meetings, and appropriate workflows.
7. Organize Cross-Department Innovation Challenges
Cross-functional innovation challenges are an exciting opportunity for your teams to hone their teamwork and collaboration skills in practice.
Since various kinds of expertise are necessary, everyone will be prompted to take part and learn how to put individual strengths to the team’s advantage.
For example, invite your teams to come up with innovative marketing campaigns by:
- Creating a set of tasks and requirements – Give your team instructions. What’s to be done? What are the things they should keep in mind (like branding guidelines)? Any budget limits?
- Forming teams of people from each department – Each person will bring different skills, perspectives, and ideas on ways to market a new product or service. The Marketing team follows social media trends, the Customer Success team knows your customers’ preferences best, the Dev team will cover technical aspects, etc.
- Making it a challenge – Turn your cross-department innovation challenge into a competition and offer rewards to the winning team to entice more effective communication and teamwork.
8. Organize Agency Hackathons
Hackathons reinforce participants’ agility, collaboration, and problem-solving skills as they get to work toward a common goal in a given context.
Hackathons drive teams to find innovative solutions to complex problems, develop new products or features, and invent something creative and useful. This helps boost their soft skills, including teamwork, stress management, and creativity.
Organizing a hackathon can be overwhelming, but you can hire an agency to handle this for you. There are many agencies you can check out, depending on your needs, location, and budget. It might be a good investment for your people to grow as a team.
9. Recognize and Celebrate Team Achievements
When you recognize your teams’ achievements, you’ll motivate your employees to do more brilliant things together.
Show your appreciation by:
- giving your team public praise via an internal communication channel, like ActiveCollab’s in-app chat, or social media,
- offering them a personalized reward or even a bonus,
- organizing team lunches, parties or trips to connect outside work.
Make your team feel more appreciated and valued, and you’ll see a spike in performance and better teamwork.
10. Host Off-Site Learning Retreats
Off-site learning retreats help reinforce team spirit and maximize the capacity of your employees. A retreat can be an adventurous learning experience for your team, especially if you’re a remote-first company.
These retreats offer classes, workshops, discussions, and other team-building activities that enable your employees to learn and spend quality leisure time together.
Look for good options to transform your organizational culture and improve teamwork. You can choose between luxurious corporate retreats, authentic getaways in the middle of nature, or something in the countryside.
11. Monthly Brainstorming Sessions
Monthly brainstorming sessions enhance team cohesion. The more often you organize these, the stronger your team will become.
For a fruitful brainstorming session:
- Create an agenda with a concise list of questions or problems you want solved.
- Define rules to encourage free speech and judgment-free active participation.
- Select a brainstorming technique, such as mind mapping, rapid ideation, or 5 whys analysis.
- Choose a tool – an online software or pen and paper.
- Take notes during the session for later analysis.
- Bring everyone together to look into suggestions and decide which ones are promising.
Make this easy by using a collaboration tool like ActiveCollab. In it, you can schedule brainstorming sessions, invite participants, take notes, and turn ideas into tasks.
Why Is It Important to Encourage Teamwork
Teamwork doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s definitely worth your while. Effective teamwork helps your business thrive in more ways than one. Let’s see which.
Increased Employee Morale, Engagement, and Loyalty
Cross-functional projects and friendly relationships significantly improve employee morale and the way people feel about their jobs and roles in the company.
Highly engaged employees do more. They are dedicated and loyal.
For you, this also means a better reputation, lower turnover rates, and a greater return on investment in terms of talent acquisition, retention, and hiring.
Improved Efficiency and Productivity
A strong sense of teamwork inspires people to combine their skills and knowledge to come up with more efficient processes.
Thanks to good communication and mutual support, your team will get better at task and time management.
The results? Streamlined workflows, optimal resource utilization, quality output.
Faster Crisis Response and Change Management
A united team is better set up to deal with risks and change.
They help you successfully minimize disruption, ensure a smooth transition, and adopt change.
Similarly, when a crisis hits, your team will be more determined to overcome it quickly and effectively. Because they’re in it together.
Boosted Innovation and Creativity
Your team is more likely to get their creative juices flowing if they work in a supportive environment.
Team spirit inspires them to build up on each other’s ideas, suggest improvements, and experiment with processes.
In ActiveCollab, you can create Discussions for these purposes and convert them to tasks if an idea turns out to be great and doable.
Greater Chances of Success
As your team members build rapport and develop their skill sets, they’ll get better at their jobs.
A shared sense of purpose will drive them to take the initiative, optimize workflows, and successfully complete projects.
Of course, you need to give them the tools and resources they need to succeed and help you reach your business goals.
Conclusion - How ActiveCollab Helps Encourage Teamwork
ActiveCollab is an all-in-one solution that helps you streamline your daily operations, boost productivity, and improve relationships between your team members.
With ActiveCollab, your team works in a shared space designed to encourage open communication and transparency, efficient organization and task management, and, most importantly, teamwork and collaboration.
To keep the pace steady and everyone included, your teams won’t need additional communication tools. With our Comments, Discussions, and In-App Chat, transparent and timely communication is guaranteed. Your teams will collaborate smoothly, keeping each other in the loop, resolving issues on the go, and reaching out for support if needed.
This will boost your teams’ efficiency, but also their morale and team spirit.
So, don’t wait any longer – sign up for our 14-day free trial or book a demo and get someone from our team to show you around, and how you can further encourage teamwork and scale your business!
