Teamwork. It’s a word that is thrown around in the office on a daily basis, but when was the last time you took a step back and actually evaluated the teamwork in your workplace?
Why Is Teamwork In The Workplace Significant?
Without effective teamwork, productivity and quality of work will likely suffer, even with a group composed of multiple brilliant individuals. Likewise, without effective teams, companies will struggle to keep pace with competitors who do have effective teams.
Multiple studies have shown that promoting good teamwork in the workplace will have positive effects on productivity, quality of work, creativity, innovation and job satisfaction, all of which benefit the company itself.
In a recent study by Stanford, participants who were working on a team as opposed to working alone persevered longer on difficult tasks, showed more interest and enjoyment in working on the tasks, required less self-regulatory effort to complete tasks, and generally performed better on the tasks. The participants who were part of a team even decided to do more tasks related to those performed in the study in a personal setting 1-2 weeks after the study.
How Can We Improve Company Teamwork?
Now that we’ve established the importance of teamwork in the workplace, let’s talk about how we can improve. Here are 8 tips on how to improve teamwork within any organization.
1. Build Diverse And Inclusive Teams
First and foremost, it is important that we focus on creating diverse teams rather than teams of all like-minded people. A group of people with different backgrounds are more likely to bring diverse perspectives and ideas to the table. With more perspectives, comes more thorough decision making. We often tend to want to surround ourselves with people who think and act in ways that reflect our own thoughts and actions.
While a group of like-minded individuals with similar backgrounds may get along great, we have to think about the bigger picture – Will they bring fresh ideas to the table? Will the team members challenge each other to tackle a project from all angles? Or, will the team members be so agreeable that they come up with ideas that don’t get questioned or elaborated upon? If all team members think the same way, come from similar backgrounds, and have the same beliefs and opinions, the work that the team produces will likely be one-sided and less creative. Whereas if each team member has unique opinions, beliefs, background, etc. they will likely produce work that reflects more creativity and innovation.
Read More: https://www.lumapps.com/solutions/enterprise-collaboration/improve-teamwork-in-the-workplace/