5 ways small businesses can improve teamwork

No business can succeed without teamwork. As rightly quoted by Michael Jordan, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” Teamwork creates synergy and helps you achieve your business objectives faster.

However, it is not easy to promote teamwork. You can build a team, but creating teamwork requires lots of effort. Your job is not over once you take a team of great employees on board as no team can work without teamwork.
Now the question is – how can you improve team spirit? Is there any way?

In today’s post, I’m going to share five practical tips on how you can boost team spirit in your organisation.

Without further ado, let’s dive in:

1. Promote collective responsibility

To make one person responsible for the completion of a project is not a good practice. You need to make sure that each member of your team feels responsible for the project. The first step to creating teamwork is to promote collective responsibility.

When you are assigning projects or tasks, you should brief it to all the members of your team who will work on the project/tasks. Make them aware of the clients’ expectations, tell them deadlines, and convey to them what you expect from them in terms of projects/tasks completion. Also, when you are reviewing the projects’ progress, you should include all the team members. Success or failure, all the members of your team should own it.   

2. Get everyone involved

Do all of your employees know your vision? Do they know how you are doing in achieving your business objectives? Are they aware of the business challenges you are facing now?

If not, then you’re making a big mistake. To promote team spirit in your organization, you should get everyone involved in your company. Have a weekly/monthly meeting, share your progress with your team members, tell them what obstacles you are facing now, and ask suggestions on how to grow fast. These simple activities will make them feel valued, and they will try to give their best to achieve your business objectives. This will eventually improve productivity.

3. Organise team-building activities

Companies that are known to have excellent teamwork regularly organise team-building activities. If you think you need to spend a lot of money to hold team-building events/activities, you are wrong. In fact, you can organise team-building activities in a moderate budget. What you have to do is to find/create opportunities for your team members to mingle with each other.

Following are easy-to-organise activities:

  • Schedule team-building lunches
  • Promote employee hobby clubs
  • Encourage your employees to volunteer for charity as a group
  • Organize team-building games such as Dog-Rice-Chicken, Blind Drawing, etc.
  • Take your team for movies

Teamwork is a culture that takes time and efforts to build it. It is not like you need to do something big to mingle your team members. Any event that brings your team together can serve the purpose and boost team spirit.  

4. Reward team collaboration

Rewarding team collaboration is a good way to instill team spirit in your organization. You have assigned projects/tasks to your teams, they have their goals. Check the progress of projects. Once your teams achieve their milestones, you should reward teams for collaboration. Also, you can include collaboration and team goals in individual review of your team members.

Here are five tips on rewarding team collaboration:

  • Reward collaboration acts and outcomes
  • Celebrate success and embrace failure as a team
  • Offer team members new opportunities to learn
  • Say thank you openly to each team member for success
  • Arrange a get-together for team members’ families

Rewarding team collaboration goes a long way. The members of your team will strive to do better as a team, and this will ensure faster projects/tasks completion.  

5. Build a proper communication channel

Having a proper communication channel is key to teamwork. If your team members are not able to freely communicate with each other, how can they collaborate successfully to achieve goals? Also, in the absence of a proper communication channel, chances are there will be miss communication. Therefore, you need to work on building a proper communication channel in your organisation.

Here are five tips to enhance team communication:

  • Adopt an open door policy
  • Encourage the culture of asking questions
  • Streamline your communication tools
  • Choose an efficient project management software application
  • Investment in communication training

For businesses having remote teams, the need for effective communication becomes more important. As remote team members don’t communicate face-to-face, there can be incidents of miscommunication. So if you have a team of remote employees, you should work on enhancing team communication to boost team spirit.

Needless to say, team spirit is key to the success of your business. It certainly improves productivity when your employees work together to achieve shared goals. Promoting collective responsibility, getting everyone in your team involved, organising team-building activities, rewarding team collaboration, and building a proper communication channel are some good ways to promote team spirit in your organisation.

What about you? Do you want to share any other practical step to improving team spirit? Please leave it in the comment section. I’d love to know about it.  

Author’s Bio

Tope Longe is a Content Marketing Specialist at Time Doctor – a productivity software designed for remote teams. He’s a lover of visual content and marketing automation technologies. Follow him @temitopeLonge

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