Strategies to Improve Teamwork in the Workplace!

Teamwork Strategies

1. Start a culture committee to promote collaboration

Invite representatives from every company department to join a committee that advocates company culture. The committee members exemplify company culture and nurture it in others.

The activities of the culture committee will vary based on your company’s unique culture.

• Plans events to bring departments together
• Makes the office more like home
• Cheers up team members in times of stress

How to do it:

• Ask for volunteers! You want to recruit people who want to be on this committee.
• Hold an onboarding meeting to define your company culture, if you don’t already have this in writing. Goal: Establish the cultural virtues you plan on promoting.
• Decide what actions the committee should prioritize to best cultivate company culture. For example, if your company culture involves “being at one with nature,” then some of your committee’s tasks could be planning monthly hikes, bringing in plants, and keeping said plants alive.
• Establish performance indicators. (We’ll host one event per month and survey employees quarterly to see how they’re feeling about culture improvements.)

 Why it works:

There’s no such thing as the culture police, which is obviously a good thing. The downside is that when no one is responsible for enforcing company culture, it runs a high risk of slipping through the cracks. Having a team responsible for fostering culture means you’re likely to develop a strong one, and a company with strong culture encourages teamwork and collaboration. 

2. Host a yearly summit to inspire big-picture thinking

Everyone in your company does vastly different things. It can be easy to forget you all work at the same place and share the same overall mission. A dedicated annual summit gives everyone the chance to take a step back from the weeds of day-to-day work and focus on the overall company missions and goals everyone has in common.

The summit nurtures teamwork and collaboration because it brings the entire company together to focus and reconnect on what they’re all working toward together.

How to do it:

• Choose an off-site location to get people out of the day-to-day mindset.
• Dedicate a team or hire a planner to coordinate the event.
• Establish event goals.
• Plan the structure of your summit based on your goals.
• Leverage your company pillars to create focused breakout sessions (or workshops) where groups of employees from different department get together to brainstorm the same topics.

Here are some examples of workshops:

• Member Experience
• What Makes the company Different
• Consumer Feedback
• The Company's Culture
• Making your company's a Destination
• Member Success/Sales Partnership

 Why it works:

It all comes back to focusing on similarities instead of differences. Each player on a football team knows his job is different from his teammates’ jobs, but he can still visualize how all the jobs contribute to a win. A summit gives your employees a chance to connect their jobs to the big win; it helps employees feel like part of a team.

3. Implement the buddy system

Help new hires learn the ropes by pairing them with veteran buddies, employees who’ve been with the company for a year or longer. The buddies help new hires with the onboarding process and answer all the little, yet important, questions that don’t merit the boss’s attention. Buddies also subtly help new hires embrace company culture.

How to do it:

• Ask for volunteer buddies.
• Send new hires and buddies a brief personality test so you can pair up those who are most compatible.
• Pair employees, explain their roles, and let them do their thing!

 Why it works:

The bonds forged through the buddy system last far beyond the onboarding period. Most buddy pairs get to know each other’s work styles so well, they grow into amazing collaborators, exemplifying the benefits of teamwork in the workplace.

4. Set a protocol for resolving conflicts

No one likes to anticipate the unpleasantness of conflict, but no matter how harmonious your company culture, conflict will happen.

If you have a plan in place for how to deal with conflict, you can spin unpleasant situations into learning events that actually boost teamwork and culture instead of destroying it.

How to do it:

• Sit down with a few trusted team members to establish a conflict-resolution protocol.
• Relay this protocol to everyone on the team; you might even consider making a cheat sheet.
• Fine tune the process as conflicts arise.

 Why it works:

An unexpected conflict can interrupt workflow and damage relationships if mishandled. Having a protocol in place avoids long-term damage, and it can even spin conflicts into opportunities for deep team building.

5. Develop a concrete plan for building trust

 Teams often fail because of a lack of trust, vulnerability-based trust to be more specific.

What is vulnerability based trust? It’s simply the trust and goodwill that grows within a team when all its members can be vulnerable. Teams score high marks in trust when everyone can admit they:

• Don’t know something
• Got something wrong
• Are impressed by someone else’s ideas and intelligence
• Need help

Vulnerability in a team enables members to help each other out, which in turn builds trust and bonding, solidifying value-based teamwork.

Unfortunately, most people don’t like to be vulnerable. That’s why you need to develop a concrete plan for encouraging vulnerability and building trust.

 Predictive trust is something you demonstrate when you trust that your coworker will finish your report when you’re out on vacation. Predictive trust enhances teamwork, but it’s not as critical as vulnerability-based trust.

How to do it:

You can’t advance trust all the time, but by encouraging and nurturing it in specific settings, trust will grow into a 24/7 state of mind. So choose a weekly team meeting, and commit to following the protocol below during each and every session. This protocol may make the meetings last longer, but the extra time will pay off in the long run.

1. Plan time for round-table commentaries after each applicable agenda item. Go around the circle and give everyone a chance to comment and question. Encourage associates to admit if they don’t understand something and ask for clarification.
2. Set aside time for a support group session. Associates can share what they’re working on and ask for help and advice or vent about challenges and setbacks.
3. Put a fishbowl at the door. Fill the bowl with paper slips printed with team members’ names. Have everyone select a name on their way out of the meeting.

Why it works:

Consider meetings microcosms of broader workflow and interactions. By encouraging vulnerability during just one meeting, you’ll enable trust to flourish in a variety of other settings as well.

6. Cultivate listening skills with “listening brainstorms.”

Communication determines a team’s success.

Help boost your team’s listening and communication skills with listening brainstorms.

How to do it:

The next time you need to host a team brainstorm on a product or idea, turn it into a listening brainstorm.

• Only one person can talk at a time.
• The speaker holds onto a prop (like a giant foam finger) to signify it’s their turn.
• When the speaker is finished, everyone else has to summarize the speaker’s idea and say something they like or dislike about it. (Disagreement is totally allowed when practicing good listening!) Because they need to summarize and intelligently comment on each shared idea, everyone will have to listen carefully instead of simply planning what they’re going to say during their turn.

Why it works:

Consider the listening brainstorms little workouts for employees’ listening muscles. In time, those muscles will grow stronger. Team members will start listening to each other more carefully, which will lead to better idea generation and stronger team projects.