For many managers, improving teamwork efficiency is a daily challenge—even more so when teams are spread across different locations. Between meetings that drag on and on, internal team conflicts, and the constant need to deliver ever-improved results while keeping teams engaged, managers’ daily lives are far from easy.
Improving teamwork efficiency helps boost both well-being and productivity. It’s a proven fact: companies that encourage collaborative working are five times more likely to achieve high performance than those that don’t. Teamwork is also a good way to solve problems more quickly through shared ideas and knowledge, thereby improving productivity.
So, how can you improve collaboration within your teams? In this article, we share eight hacks with you that our team and clients have tested and approved.
1. Clarify roles
Lack of clarity can drastically put the brakes on efficient teamwork. When who does what isn’t even clear, it can be difficult to identify the one responsible for what task and who to talk to on what subject. This wastes precious team time. For this reason, employees who clearly know their role are 53% more effective than those who find their role a bit ambiguous.
To avoid this ambiguity, define roles with clear responsibilities, and map them on a dedicated tool such as Holaspirit to visualize them better. If a role is filled by several people, remember to also clarify the scope of action and decision-making powers.
2. Align goals across all teams
Aligning team goals with those of your entire organization allows all employees to work toward common goals, thereby improving teamwork efficiency. Rather than letting everyone just come up with their own objectives, ask teams to link their objectives to those of the company—and to work on these goals in collaboration with other teams.
To create such alignment, you can rely on the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method, which allows you to define specific, measurable objectives at all levels of the company. Creating OKRs will also help employees to better understand the impact of their work, which in turn can help to develop their commitment.
Our Swiss customer QoQa quickly saw the benefits of this method when they implemented OKRs in their operations:
3. Empower employees
Micromanagement is still a pervasive business practice. By now, every manager understands that it’s far from being the best way to improve teamwork efficiency. Instead, try the opposite approach: rather than checking over your employees’ shoulders every minute, try giving them more autonomy! This makes workers feel more responsible and involved in their work.
Of course, the aim is not for employees to sit idly. It’s important to still provide a framework or governance model such as a Holacracy or a Sociocracy. This is what one of our clients, Great Place to Work Netherlands, has done:
To encourage team autonomy, it’s also important to create a climate of psychological safety. In other words, make sure your employees feel safe enough to take risks, share their opinions and suggest new ideas.
4. Create team rituals
Rituals play a key role in any organization. They not only help synchronize teamwork, but also create bonds between employees. Examples include:
- Tactical meetings: often held on a weekly basis, these team meetings enable regular monitoring of projects, resolving potential problems and ensuring that everyone is on the same wavelength.
- Team-building activities: these help to improve team cohesion through a variety of formats (afterwork meetups, seminars, competitions, escape games, quizzes, etc.).
- Celebrating success: every week/month/quarter, teams share their proudest achievements with the rest of the company (at a dedicated meeting, or via a post on the enterprise social network).
These rituals don’t necessarily have to be long meetings. For example, sending a simple “hi there” greeting on the chat every morning, or a GIF to celebrate the weekend every Friday can already help strengthen communication and team cohesion.
5. Foster cross-team collaboration
Teamwork isn’t just about collaborating with team members. Cross-team collaboration (among different departments) should also be encouraged to promote knowledge sharing. A number of initiatives can help develop these exchanges, including:
- Create cross-functional working groups made up of employees from different departments. This is what one of our clients, Smart4 Engineering, has done with Talkspirit.
- Organize workshops to enable employees from different teams to discuss their common challenges—and then find solutions together.
- Set up mentoring sessions where experienced employees can share their knowledge with other employees, and thus support skill building.
6. Document your processes and best practices
If you want to improve teamwork efficiency, you need to ensure that your employees can easily find the information they need. To achieve this, it’s essential to document your organization’s best practices and processes.
Here are some tips on how to document this information:
- Centralize your data on a common platform for all teams (for example, via Holaspirit‘s Publications module).
- Create a tree structure to organize your internal content and make it easier to find.
- Create a documentation process and use templates to standardize your practices.
- Regularly update all your internal documents.
Also read: How to Ensure Knowledge Capitalization within your Company?
7. Make meetings more efficient
More than half of all employees feel they spend too much time in meetings (on average, almost 23 hours a week for managers!). Two needs are therefore emerging: the need to reduce the number of meetings, but also to make meetings shorter and more effective.
In our experience, here are a few practices that can help combat meeting fatigue:
- Define a clear agenda and clarify what is expected of participants in advance of the meeting.
- Limit the number of participants. For example, our customer Amicio invites a maximum of 3 to 4 people to each work meeting, so that teamwork is as effective as possible.
- Appoint a facilitator to run the meeting, a secretary to take notes, and a timekeeper to make sure the meeting doesn’t run over.
Also read: Leading a Meeting: Best (and Worst) Practices
8. Streamline your collaborative tools
Collaborative tools are great, but trust us: you don’t need a ton of different tools to make great teamwork happen! According to an Asana report, the average employee uses 10 applications 25 times each day. Just goes to show that it’s time to streamline our applications!
Rather than firing up an office suite and then a plethora of other different tools for videoconferencing, chat, project management, and more, why not opt instead for an all-in-one collaborative tool that brings all these features together? Talkspirit centralizes all this. In addition to its collaborative functions, Talkspirit boosts your internal communications with a news feed you can organize by thematic groups, as well as a customizable home portal. It’s the ideal platform for streamlining your communication and collaboration tools.
Finally, if you’re looking to improve your organization’s transparency and agility, we also recommend implementing the Holaspirit tool. Holaspirit allows you to clarify roles and responsibilities, improve the efficiency of meetings, document your policies and processes, define your objectives with the OKR method, and much more!
A final word
In a wrap, to improve teamwork efficiency, remember to clarify roles, align goals across all your teams, develop autonomy, encourage cross-functional collaboration, and put the right collaborative tools in place (and without overdoing it!)
Remember, these practices only work best if you support them with an organizational culture that values collaboration, mutual aid, and knowledge sharing. So before implementing them, ask yourself: is the corporate culture aligned with the collaborative practices you want to develop? If so, you have fertile ground to boost teamwork efficiency. If not, the priority will be to rework your corporate culture and raison d’être.
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