5 Tips for Better Teamwork and Collaboration

[February 16, 2022]  Teamwork makes the dream work and it’s never been more important than in today’s diverse and distributed workplaces. Without a team mentality and established practices for communication and collaboration, companies are prone to organizational silos and a breakdown of leadership. Collaborative teams, on the other hand, are efficient, innovative, and accountable to the company’s goals.

What does it take to establish a collaborative business culture? From The Leader Maker blog, these are the steps that will boost collaboration in your business.

1. Make collaboration part of your company culture

Don’t hire high-performing rockstars and be disappointed when they lack collaborative spirit. Fostering a collaborative company culture requires hiring people who know how to work in a team and value relationships and open communication. A collaborative culture also needs to come from the top down. Make sure you’re modeling behavior you want to see by communicating with employees, encouraging them to share ideas, and giving and soliciting frequent feedback. Leaders should also pay attention to the way they speak at the office and be mindful about choosing inclusive language and making space for diverse employees to share their opinions.

2. Establish communication best practices

A communication plan outlines best practices like when to use real-time versus asynchronous communication, how often team meetings are held, when to provide status updates, and how to choose between various communication tools like email, chat, or video. Establishing conventions for internal communication ensures everyone is looped in and prevents information from falling through the cracks.

3. Clarify roles and stakeholders

Who is responsible for providing project status updates and who needs to receive them? Clear expectations set teams up for success by ensuring everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and key stakeholders. Otherwise, teams are prone to unevenly-distributed workloads and duplicate work. Leaders should also check in with teams to reinforce roles and adjust responsibilities based on individual strengths and weaknesses.

4. Use the right tools

Upgrade your business’s internal communications with a tech stack designed for modern teams. In addition to chat and video conferencing apps, project management tools are a must for companies both large and small. Project management apps organize all your tasks, files, communications in one place for total visibility and seamless collaboration. Of course, it’s still important to stay organized within the platform so onboard employees and establish conventions for organizing files within the app. If you’re dealing with a lot of files from different sources a PDF merging tool can combine PDFs into one file so you can pull up all documents for a specific date or topic without sorting through multiple documents.

5. Make time for relationship-building

Strong relationships are at the heart of effective collaboration. When employees trust each other and value their opinions, it creates a culture of open communication that can lead to groundbreaking ideas. Encourage informal communication and create opportunities for employees to build one-on-one relationships. For example, assign a mentor to a new employee, pair remote employees to work “together” over video chat, or maintain a virtual break room or social chat channel for water cooler conversations. Leaders should also strengthen their own relationships with employees by holding walk-in office hours, scheduling one-on-one check-ins, and making a point to give praise and recognition.

Whether your employees are down the hall or across the country, collaboration is the glue that holds your company together. Make communication and collaboration a priority in your business by arming your team with the tools they need to work effectively together and setting standards around how and when to communicate. With these tips, you can create a culture of mutual respect and collaboration that sets your business on the path to greatness.