A lack of teamwork and poor collaboration can wreak havoc on your workplace.
If your team members aren’t able to keep up with each other and stay on track with their projects, it’s going to be very hard for your company to grow and thrive long-term.
Not sure where to begin when it comes to encouraging more teamwork? Keep reading.
Listed below are five steps you can start taking today to promote teamwork and make sure everyone is organized and on the same page.
1. Make Communication Easy and Consistent
Good communication practices are essential if you want everyone at your company working together as a team. Whether everyone shares an open-plan office or works remotely, there are lots of ways that you can encourage communication between employees. For example, making use of a team messaging system allows you to establish one specific place where everyone can connect with each other and talk about ideas or express concerns. Even if people aren’t all working in the same place at the same time, they can use this messaging system to stay up-to-speed on the latest developments and make sure they don’t miss anything important.
In addition to using a team messaging system, there are some other steps you can take to encourage communication among your staff. For example, make sure you’re encouraging them to voice their ideas or concerns. Hold open forums for feedback and ask people (either via the team messaging system, in an email, or in-person) on a regular basis how they’re doing and what you can do to help them perform their jobs better.
2. Simplify Sharing with Project Management Tools
A whopping 77 percent of high-performing projects use some kind of project management tool to help everyone stay on track. If you aren’t using technology to help keep everyone on the same page, you’re missing out on a lot of great benefits.
One of the primary reasons why people love using project management tools is the fact that they help to simplify the sharing process. With the right project management tool, your employees can upload and share files with ease to ensure everyone is always dealing with the latest edition of a document or project. These tools allow for easy-to-access online storage, too, to prevent important documents from getting lost.
Project management tools also promote transparency among everyone on your team.
Because everyone is collaborating on tasks together and can see what others are doing, it’s easy to ensure every team member is pulling their way and doing what they’re supposed to. This also encourages greater productivity and keeps everyone on track to meet their individual deadlines.
3. Conduct Regular Planning Sessions
It’s good to chat throughout the day and keep up with the little details and issues that people may be running into with their projects. However, it’s also a good idea to conduct regular planning sessions for everyone on the team.
Regular planning sessions allow your team to come together and address the bigger picture. They can work together to brainstorm ideas for upcoming projects or ways they can improve on existing projects. These sessions encourage teamwork and collaboration at every stage of the project and will help you see ways in which you can improve your management style.
When you hold planning sessions, make sure everyone knows what the purpose of the session is. Let them know that they’re free to throw out whatever ideas come to mind, too. If your workers feel that they’re in a safe place, it’s likely that they’ll feel much more inclined to share without fear of judgment.
4. Eliminate Unnecessary Meetings
While regular planning sessions are a good idea, you shouldn’t bog your workers down with a lot of unnecessary meetings.
Workers, on average, consider approximately half of all meetings to be time-wasters. Businesses also spend about 31 hours per month on unimportant or unnecessary meetings.
When you hold tons of meetings to address issues that could have easily been covered in an email or quick group message, you slow down the production process and hinder your workers’ ability to be productive.
This is the beauty of using a good employee messaging system.
If you utilize a project management tool with robust messaging features, it’ll be easy for you to send out messages and keep everyone in the loop without having to throw a wrench in their workflow with yet another meeting.
Before you pull a Michael Scott and invite everyone into the conference room, take a step back and ask yourself whether or not the subject you want to address requires a team-wide meeting. Could you get the same message across in an email or by using your project management tool?
5. Have Weekly One-on-One Meetings
Instead of holding time-wasting group meetings, try to conduct regular one-on-one meetings with individual members of your team instead.
This gives you a chance to address specific issues without having to take everyone away from their work at once. Your employees may also be more inclined to share their concerns or talk about their projects if they’re not doing it in front of all their co-workers.
Remember that you can also use your project coordination tool to conduct private one-on-one or small group meetings.
If you want to address just a few members of your staff without everyone else knowing — maybe to assign them to another project or ask their feedback on their current workload — you can chat with them using your team messaging system. This allows you to get your point across without calling an in-person meeting and alerting everyone else on the team.
Build Teamwork with the Best Project Coordination Tool
If you need a project coordination tool that can help you master all of these steps, heycollab is the tool for you.
heycollab goes above and beyond other project management tool options like Slack and Trello and provides your team with all the resources they need to collaborate and get things done. Give it a try for free today!