Building an effective team and to work as a team, needs a specific set of effective teamwork skills which are essential for any administrator or supervisor. Even if a person is not in charge of the group yet, a more appropriate perception of teamwork can help him or her to be a more efficient part of the team and can be of additional advantage by increasing his or her importance in the organization.
A team can be successful only when it can achieve a bigger goal and function more effectively while the individual team members work together rather than working individually.
However, team performance depends on two very significant factors: the whole team determinations should be focused towards achieving a common goal and maintaining an effective communication and coordination amongst the team members. Here are few team building tips, concepts and methods which will surely bring success to any organization planning to work as a team.
14 Best Tips for Effective Teamwork: Work as a Team
The following mentioned are few characteristics of effective teamwork and tips on how to work better as a team.
1. Ensure Clarity:
The only focus of the team should be their set common goals and all the members should be dedicated to accomplish them.
There should be clear directions from the supervisors regarding methods to attain those goals and the whole team should understand and agree on these targets and the methods to achieve them.
Complete clarity should be there while depicting job responsibilities for various team members.
2. Expedite Effective Communication:
Communication is one of the most significant factors in effective teamwork. Effective team meetings are not the only way to facilitate proper communication within a team; rather it is always preferable that the supervisor remains open to the team members for sharing their suggestions and worries. This will prevent confusion and misunderstanding within the team environment.
Supervisors should be easily approachable and accessible, this will reassure team members and they can comfortably share their outlooks, ideas and information. This will eventually result in building enhanced group dynamics and healthy relationships.
Highlighting the significance of individual team member’s role and communicating their job importance will drive the whole team closer to target.
3. Define Team Ethics, Rules and Mission:
Defining a mission is a basic but important step while building a successful team. This will help the whole team to focus on mission statement and they can work together dedicatedly to achieve their common goals. Before starting teamwork, the team should have certain established ethics and rules to follow, which will bind the team members together for a common purpose.
There should be set standards, established by the superiors, which should be common for all working as a team member. This will ensure competence and proficiency amongst team members.
Rules can be simple instructions like team members should maintain punctuality, have to achieve certain goals within given deadlines or norms stating common guiding principles. Ethics are similarly very important for teams to work together competently without conflicts. The whole team should agree on the ethics and rules and should follow them committedly.
4. Inspire Creativeness:
Creativity is the main essence for successful target accomplishments. Supervisors should always welcome creative and original ideas from each team member.
The result may be surprising, and often it is seen team members come up with excellent innovative ideas that might actually accelerate the success of a project. However, supervisors should remember to cut out pessimistic comments which may dishearten the team members and they might not come up with new ideas as they won’t feel comfortable to express their feelings in future.
A team should operate in a compassionate environment that heartily welcomes innovative thoughts. Each employee’s idea should be appreciated for effective teamwork.
5. Frequent Brainstorming:
Brainstorming is an excellent method to establish aims and objectives, the method to attain those goals and have a conversation about everything related to a project.
Brainstorming can serve as a stage to listen to innovative ideas and will provoke the team members to search for unique solutions to various problems which might come across the way to achieve definite goals. This will encourage the team members to share their views and opinions which will take them closer to their personal goals as well.
6. Building Trust:
Building trust among the team members will surely increase the confidence and sense of dependence amongst team members which will definitely strengthen the bonding shared by members.
Sincerity and trustworthiness are essential keys of team work and a supervisor should be loyal to the team members in order to anticipate the same from them. There are lots of ways to build trust within team members like trust-building activities and spending more relaxed time with each other in informal ambiance. Trust building is an effective way to increase team enthusiasm and bring the team members together to attain team targets. It is evidenced that trustworthy teams always function better and can achieve targets more easily.
Team members should have a deep feeling of attachment to the team. When trust building is successful, team members feel intensely loyal to the team’s activities. This feeling of loyalty and dedication is enriched and strengthened when the group spends quality time to decide future course of actions and strategy formulations to achieve goals.
7. Explain Job Responsibilities:
Lots of teams function without supervisors, and all the team members play equal important roles in target achievement. But the problem is, if their job responsibilities are not clearly defined, there might be lots of confusions and misunderstandings concerning work delegations which may delay the team activities.
Even when a team operates with a supervisor, the team leader should explain the job responsibilities of individual team members so that they may not overlap.
Productive teams need well-defined and distinct details of tasks to be performed by each and every team member, so that all team members should know their responsibilities as well as roles of others. This will ensure better team coordination and understanding.
8. Efficient Conflict Handling:
It’s one of the most common problems while working in teams. It’s very natural when different people with different job responsibilities and skill sets work together for a common purpose. Sometimes, two or more people may share a common job responsibility which eventually results in conflicts and misunderstandings among them.
A supervisor should always be enough careful to notice conflicts and should immediately take steps to resolve conflicts, or else, this small conflicts may grow into huge issues causing greater problems for the whole team.
Small conflicts may become ego issues affecting the whole work procedure of the team. Certain amount of conflict is normal among team members, but a supervisor should always ensure that they are resolved at the primary stage itself to avoid bigger complications. If conflicts can be handled efficiently, it may infact yield productive ideas.
9. Ensure Proper Appraisal and Rewards System:
Designing a proper appraisal and reward system is an integral part of team building. The supervisor should prepare well-defined guidelines of how to appraise any individual team member or a group performance or maybe the whole team.
The supervisor should measure performances with expected outcomes and evaluate accordingly. Along with expected outcomes, the supervisor should reward special skills in the team members like coordination skill, communication skill, problem solving skill and conflict resolving skills. This will inspire team members to perform dedicatedly giving their best and also providing positive feedbacks about their subordinates, peers and superiors.
Also a superior should reward them appropriately to increase motivation in the employees. Rewards can be in the form of increments, bonus, promotions or even an informal treat from the boss. The supervisor should focus more on achievements rather than finding performance gaps, this will surely upsurge the spirit of the team.
10. Publicize Team Achievements:
Supervisors should let others know about team achievements within the organization. It’s always beneficial to tell the full organization about team success and achievements encompassing particular depictions of the activities of the team members and challenges faced by them that made this success possible.
The supervisor might include the name of people who are not members of the team but has helped the team externally towards achieving success. This gesture of acknowledgements will definitely bring happiness in the employees as well as will definitely motivate them to perform well in future. Even a simple thank you might be a great motivational factor for many team members.
11. Agreement Is the Base of Team Work:
Supervisors should give immense importance to employee consent. While setting goals or deciding solutions for various challenges or formulating strategy to achieve objectives, supervisors should ask team members regarding their views and the decision should be agreed by all team members.
Establishing this method of taking consensuses of the group members will ultimately facilitate better understanding and will help in decision making. Moreover, this will make team members feel more devoted to the team and feel that their individual consents are also valuable for the team.
A particular method should be formed to take consents from employees. It may be during a brainstorming, a normal discussion or via employee feedbacks. The supervisors should also set the parameters to achieve general agreements from team members.
12. Build a Team of Combined Genders:
This may look like a bizarre tip for building a team, but is actually an important one which is sometimes overlooked. Supervisors should create having both male and female group members. Specially women, as it is proven that their communication skills and sometimes managerial skills are superior to that of the male team members.
With the use of the social skills of the female team members, supervisors can have direct effect on performance of team. Researchers have proved that organizations having women panel members have performed better compared to those having only men.
13. Job Freedom:
Giving work freedom to team members to contribute their best to their jobs, will enhance their job input in order to ensure better team performance. Supervisors should allow flexibility to team members regarding their methods to achieve job targets.
Encouraging team members to suggest required changes and methods to improve team performance could be highly beneficial. It’s always better to set goals and let the team members to work on their own as per their convenience to accomplish those goals. Eventually this will also prove to be beneficial and make team members capable enough for decision making.
14. Don’t Forget To Be the Leader:
Many supervisors forget their leadership role while playing the role of team member. Although they are part of the team, they should always remember that they are the leaders too. However it is essential to encourage the team members to sense a good leadership guiding them whenever needed.
The team leaders should avoid plating the role of a team member being one of them, rather, should guide the team and set required goals and rules to drive the team members in pursuit of success. The team leaders should achieve the predetermined goals through the team members.
Lastly, although building a successful team and working with it might be problematic, but the success achieved after an effective teamwork is much rewarding. Proficient team building and effective teamwork are indispensable part running a successful organization.
Every time when two or more persons work together to accomplish a shared target, a team is formed. With these few simple teamwork skills and tips, any supervisor can surely build efficient teams and perform effective teamwork. The only thing that has to be taken care of is the happiness of the team members working in a team together.
Happy team members will dedicate their best to accomplish the decided objective and they might even succeed in doing it quicker than other individual employees. Capable teams always yield superior outcomes, just the team leaders have to ensure that the team members are contented and should diminish and resolve conflict efficiently.
The supervisors are responsible to guide their teams in the right track and achieve the agreed objectives. The main essence of teamwork lies in the fact that individual contributions are grouped together and are channelized in the right way by the team leader to attain predefined objectives.
