True that working alone makes us feel more comfortable, and there are many talented people who can close work by themselves. But no matter how skilled, probably can't handle large-scale work alone. Having good teamwork is therefore important. Because having good teamwork creates exchange of new ideas and makes work succeed smoothly and efficiently from different abilities and skills of each person. Today, Ngern Tidlor brings tips on how to build a "team" to "work" for everyone.
Importance of Teamwork
When lacking good teamwork or not seeing shared goals, team members focus on finishing their own work mainly, without exchanging opinions to make work better or helping others in the team. And if conflicts arise without being resolved until different people don't respect each other, work atmosphere won't be good and nobody's happy with work. The result is work efficiency and work quality tend to decrease noticeably.
Stanford University researched differences between working alone and working in groups and concluded that experiment participants working as teams have more endurance persevering through difficult tasks to succeed, have more interest and fun with work, and produce better results than people working alone.
How to Build Teamwork?
Teamwork isn't something that suddenly occurs by itself, but comes from organization's effort making teamwork part of corporate culture. Culture that helps build teamwork is culture stimulating working together and developing together, through showing team members benefits of working together and showing each person's role in how they can help organizational goals succeed.
Methods for Building Teamwork Within Teams and Between Teams
Assign Appropriate and Clear Duties to Team Members
When team members are uncertain about their duties and responsibilities, chances of doing duplicate projects or work occur. If many employees do same work due to confusion and uncertainty about their own scope of responsibility, team's valuable time and effort spent on work are wasted. Therefore we must assign appropriate and clear duties to team members to maximize use of available resources.
Support Candid and Regular Communication
Although it sounds like basic knowledge because everyone knows communication is important, at the same time it's something many people overlook. So, we must emphasize again that clear and frequent communication makes team members understand each other, resulting in work finishing more accurately in shorter time. Good communication also helps build trust between team members.
Create Trust Within Team
If don't trust each other, hard to work together. Trust is very necessary if wanting to build successful team. Fortunately, trust between team members isn't something that difficult to build. Just spending free time getting to know each other in other aspects besides work or meeting for dinner outside helps.
Cultivate Empathy
When different parties try to understand each other, it makes working together smoother and more efficient. Learning work across departments besides understanding obstacles and problems of other teams, sometimes seeing problems from outsider perspective might get ideas for solving problems and help improve work processes to help other teams be more efficient too.
Create Common Language
Using difficult terminology understood only within teams might make people in other teams feel inaccessible. Also makes communication difficult and causes misunderstandings more easily. Method to make cross-team communication easier is creating "common language" to use together between teams. Might use similar words understood more easily, or if must use technical terminology, must support everyone on teams learning basic vocabulary other departments use, to communicate efficiently. Like Ngern Tidlor's example, which has Build The Future (BTF) team, which is Cross Functional gathering of Business and IT teams to think new projects for organization. Both sides must start learning from each other more. Business must learn terminology IT uses often, or IT must understand business perspective more.
Participate in Other Departments' Work Processes
Imagine IT side spent over two months, tens of sprints to design a system, only to have Business side say the design can't be used because doesn't match brief. These situations not only make teams frustrated and discouraged, but also affect whole project schedule and budget. But these disappointments are avoidable if each team participates in other departments' processes to ensure Solution proposed by one team aligns with overall vision and is within other teams' capabilities.
Leader's Role in Building Teamwork
Leader's or boss's role in building teamwork is equally important. Because every team should have team leader who unites team, who can bring out team members' potential fully and be example for team members. Main duties of leaders are getting to know team people to understand different strengths, fairly distributing workload, and praising everyone on team's efforts.
How Having Teamwork Helps Organization
Reduce Internal Workplace Conflicts
Internal workplace conflicts directly affect organization. Because when conflicts occur, employees communicate less and have no motivation to work, making overall Productivity decrease too. Having teamwork supporting everyone working together happily eliminates these problems.
Generate New Ideas
No matter how skilled or experienced one employee is, they can only give ideas from one perspective. Because nobody's skilled at everything or knows about everything. But if working as team, we receive diverse perspectives and ideas. And if combining these ideas together, we might get new ideas never thought of before.
Increase Work Efficiency
When working as team, we can divide big work into small pieces to make work easier and finish faster. Dividing work according to each person's expertise also produces higher quality work.
Team Members Value Organizational Goals
Everyone having teamwork and valuing collective benefit is important part making organization succeed. Because if team lacks teamwork, they'll be selfish. And when each person focuses on different goals, organization can't move forward.
Summary
Because building super working teams is important force driving organization forward efficiently. Therefore, building teamwork shouldn't be done temporarily, but is something people in organization do together daily continuously and regularly. If working as team is only important when doing recreational activities together, in the end when returning to office employees will return to caring only about their own KPIs, won't make any difference from before. Therefore to create culture of working as team, we must start by valuing big goals and viewing success as something shareable.
If you want to learn more about Candid Teamwork value and the way Ngern Tidlor has actually done to integrate teamwork into employees' daily lives, join TIDLOR Culture Wow with us to exchange ideas about values and organizational culture!
Interested, contact 02-792-1990 or fill out the form here to wait for a callback from Culture Gangster
Source:
https://www.michiganstateuniversityonline.com/resources/leadership/how-to-build-a-culture-of-teamwork/
https://www.lumapps.com/employee-experience/improve-teamwork-in-the-workplace/
https://www.liveabout.com/how-to-build-a-teamwork-culture-1918509
https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/deal-unbalanced-workload-team-16792.html
https://www.workzone.com/blog/9-ways-to-improve-collaboration-between-departments/
https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/importance-of-teamwork