Collaboration is the key to business success. It means working together as a team to achieve a common goal. But sometimes, it’s hard to get everyone to work well together. 86% of employees claim that a lack of collaboration or ineffective communication leads to workplace failures. When people don’t collaborate well, it causes problems and wastes time.
Your work as a team leader can easily be compared to that of a coach. It is all about handling your team members’, mentality, collaboration strengths, and weaknesses to extract the most from them. You must always try to take 110% of your colleagues’ capacity in a collaborative manner that allows team spirit and cooperation to flourish.
Is it an easy job? No way. The difficulties lie down to collaboration, hence the lack of true coaches. Finding a very talented employee is easier than an average talented team leader. So, if you want to lead your team successfully, you should think twice and be certain that what you want to improve is through your team’s performance and not through your actions.
In this article, you will get 8 tips for improving team collaboration at work so that you can succeed and reach your business productivity goals.
8 Tips to Improve Team Collaboration
Building a strong collaborative team takes a lot of effort but is worth it as it boosts the productivity, creativity, and morale of your team. Here are some tips that will help you improve team collaboration at your digital workplace:
1. Set Key Milestones and Goals
When people with different roles work together, establish a common goal between all parties. Having a clear understanding of what they are working toward can help team members use their time effectively. This ensures they understand the company’s goals and plans.
Once you establish a common goal, your team can direct the conversation and workflow toward idea creation or problem-solving. The common goal also guides you and your team throughout the collaboration process to keep everyone on track.
Also, each one should have a very clear short-term target. If targets are long-term or if they are not set precisely, you will end up having people working on the wrong tasks, overlapping tasks, or even not working at all. Short-term targets help you follow up with their work and evaluate it correctly.
2. Define Roles and Responsibilities
When your team members know their specific duties, they will work with more focus and be better aligned with the goal. Moreover, there will be no duplicate work done.
As a manager, define clear roles and responsibilities for your team members. Collaboration does not mean that everyone will do the same tasks or that all resources can be reused. Having straightforward roles will help avoid conflicts and/or unassigned tasks. However, you should redefine these roles from time to time.
What’s more, accepting your errors early in role assignment can reduce the cost of the error. It will also give you the ability to try each member in different roles. Productivity measurement tools will help in the right way.
3. Use Collaboration Software
We don’t live in the middle ages anymore. Many enterprise collaboration platforms can help you assign tasks, create projects, track the team’s progress, add milestones, share documents online, share tasks, handle events, etc.
For instance, ProofHub fosters a collaborative environment by providing a central platform for communication, file sharing, and task management. This streamlines workflows, improves efficiency, and empowers teams to achieve their goals together.
On the other hand, Comidor focuses on enterprise collaboration by offering a digital workspace that helps improve process optimization and automation to perform business tasks more efficiently.
You can find any feature in these tools you could ever imagine about team collaboration. So, there is no excuse even if you have to manage teams in different locations. Even if you are a small company, implementing effective strategies and using the right tools can streamline communication and collaboration across diverse geographical areas. You could even use live video or audio chat to have a daily meeting. They usually offer powerful business intelligence tools to export analytics and reports.
4. Encourage Open and Transparent Communication
Encourage open communication and mean it. Collaboration happens when everyone feels like they can bring their whole selves to work.
As a manager, motivate your team members to participate, innovate, and communicate. Make sure that everyone is allowed to speak their minds and share their ideas. This means that instead of holding back their thoughts or reigning in their feelings, they can be themselves and bring all of the great ideas that come with it.
But, open communication also means that, sometimes, they are going to disagree. Disagreements are not counter to team collaboration. Healthy disagreements and open conversations are critical to unlocking successful team collaboration.
5. Manage Resources Effectively
If you are responsible for selecting your team members, think carefully about who you choose. If you choose members with identical abilities you will end up in conflicts between their roles. Balance in capacities is always the key to harmony.
Try to make at least two people work on a certain type of task periodically. Small groups of 2-3 team members can exchange ideas on accomplishing a certain task more efficiently. The knowledge inside the team should be shared and distributed evenly, ensuring that no single individual becomes the sole expert on a particular task or process.
6. Create a Sense of Community
You cannot collaborate with a stranger. Even open-source projects maintained by programmers located far from each other try to have a closer relationship.
This does not mean that everyone must be best friends with anyone, but that everyone sees the others as equivalent members. Respect and understanding are of top priority in a community. Egoism on the other side can have disastrous effects.
7. Hold Regular Meetings
A short meeting per day is helpful to see where the team is heading, what problems they face, and even get a hint on the relations growing among them. It also creates a light feeling of competition which often has creative results.
Nevertheless, you should try to keep a balance in your number of meetings frequency and duration, because long meetings especially in the middle of the day will end up reducing your team’s productivity dramatically.
8. Reward and Recognize Good Work
Justice and objectiveness are what team members want to have from their managers. Rewards can help in this direction. Personal rewards may lead to positive competitive feelings by other team members and more often end in everyone’s efforts to achieve the same good performance.
A team leader should be able to praise and thank the members of the team who try harder. The reward does not have to be something expensive. The gesture is what counts. Additionally, investing in employee upskilling is crucial. Providing opportunities for professional development not only enhances individual capabilities but also strengthens the overall team performance. When employees feel valued and see tangible growth in their skills, it fosters a culture of continuous improvement and commitment.
Conclusion
Building a cohesive and effective team is crucial for achieving success. By implementing the above team collaboration tips, you can build a highly collaborative team.
Successful teamwork means open communication among team members, clearly defined roles, and a sense of community. Effective team collaboration boosts efficiency and lets you and your team achieve your productivity goals.
*This article was written by the Comidor team in collaboration with an external guest author.
Author Bio
Vartika Kashyap, CMO at ProofHub, is a renowned B2B SaaS marketer with 17+ years of experience. She’s a prolific writer with 200+ articles on productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Vartika is a three-time LinkedIn Top Voice recipient and a thought leader in people management. Her work is featured on various top-tier publication platforms such as Muck Rack, Medium, eLearning Industry, Business2Community, DZone, Social Media Today, G2., and TweakYourBiz.
