A successful teamwork effectiveness model is a type of teamwork that is discussed extensively in business circles. Yet within the confines of the offices, it is practiced far less.
If you ask workers and management about the primary reason for failures, 86% of them will blame lack of collaboration or lousy communication. On the other hand, almost half of the employees believe there isn’t enough communication in their team. Among the employers, only 18% take time to evaluate the quality of communication within their team, while only 5.9% communicate goals daily.
So, if you want to ensure you’re nurturing a healthy atmosphere in your office, turn to these tips to ensure effective teamwork in your workplace.
Top 5 Teamwork Effectiveness Models for the Modern Workplace
1. Set both personal and business goals
Work that is accompanied by a purpose is called passion. Work without ambition is a punishment. This goes both for personal and business goals. One valuable tip we can give you when establishing an effective teamwork dynamic is to ensure these goals are aligned.
It would help if you had these kinds of conversations with your employees during the hiring process, and it is essential to evaluate these goals periodically. Some of the questions you may want to ask include the following:
- Do they want to work on more significant projects?
- Do they feel more comfortable with sprints?
- Do they feel like they need more practice?
- Do they like to learn something new?
The answers will help you set the right goals to contribute to your project’s success and your employee’s professional growth and achievement. That’s how you’ll make sure that your team diligently works towards the organizational goals.
Set SMART goals which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Writing down these goals will translate to an 80% higher chance of achieving them. Use an all-in-one remote collaboration software that visualizes short, mid, and long-term goals. This way, all your team members will understand their tasks, roles in the project, and the prerequisites for each next step.
2. Clearly outlined roles
One of the essential elements of implementing teamwork effectiveness models is having clearly outlined roles & responsibilities.
While plenty of entrepreneurs and business gurus have been promoting “multitasking” as the holy grail of efficiency, the actual science of our brain begs to differ. Several studies have shown that multitasking has a negative effect on productivity. It makes people less organized, decreases focus due to switching from one task to another, and impairs the ability to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant details.
Regarding teamwork effectiveness, the message is unmistakable — team roles should be clearly outlined, and each team member should focus on one task at a time. Indeed, sometimes you’ll face challenging situations where multitasking will be the only solution. However, these should be exceptions — not your typical modus operandi.
Clear roles allow your employees to focus on their tasks. They also help team members hold themselves and others accountable for their part of the job. You can neatly organize your team’s roles with high-quality collaboration tools and assign tasks accordingly.
You can go further into transparency and break down the importance of their roles and goals with an explanatory video for each employee and department.
3. Process visualization
We mentioned the importance of writing down and visualizing your goals to improve teamwork effectiveness.
Using Kanban-style boards, you can organize your project by assigning tasks to team members, setting deadlines, and enabling communication between all team members, management, and stakeholders.
While each organization member is focused primarily on their tasks, they can see their co-workers’ progress and consult with them anytime.
While your team members should know what’s happening, they must understand how it’s going on. For example, a marketing team member’s primary focus is creating good content or driving traffic to your site.
However, to be truly good at their job, they must understand what turns an idea into a deliverable product.
Creating project roadmaps with milestones and dependencies is a great way to visualize this process in an elegant, simple, yet highly effective way.
Depending on the industry type and project, one can present these roadmaps in a timeline view, Swimlane view, and master overview.
While the timeline keeps all team members gathered around a linear set of milestones, a swimlane view is more flexible to adapt to agile teams’ needs.
Swimlane view is a good fit for large organizations handling multiple departments and projects at the same time.
4. Play hard, work harder
It’s a given — good friends who nurture healthy communication and trust make a great team. If you’re not taking our word for it, here’s what Google concluded after years of studying teamwork effectiveness. Trust is what matters most.
In a business environment, your team members feel safe to take risks in the office. The risk can be a groundbreaking idea or simply admitting a mistake. Admittedly, building trust is a process that takes time and effort. It starts with recruiting team members whose strengths and weaknesses are in harmony.
For this group to be influential, each member must be an excellent cultural fit for your company, espousing values and beliefs that drive your organization’s mission. But ultimately, nurturing trust and friendship among your employees comes down to those little day-to-day things.
While occasional team building cannot hurt, it’s equally important to encourage your team members to take breaks during their working hours.
This is when the small yet crucial interactions happen, creating a friendly, relaxed workplace atmosphere that builds trust.
5. Transparency: Underlying element of all the Teamwork Effectiveness Models
Transparency is the underlying element of all the teamwork effectiveness models we’ve mentioned. Setting SMART goals, assigning roles, creating project roadmaps, and building trust are about nurturing organizational transparency.
What we want to outline is that transparency is a two-way street. It should not flow only between team members or from team to management. The executives also have to keep their employees in the loop about things that are relevant to their projects and professional development.
Incorporating reporting features into collaboration tools allows managers and employees to analyze productivity, project costs, and duration and compare them against initial projections.
This way, you can encourage a healthy discussion about future goals and current challenges and build realistic expectations.
Closing Thoughts for Effective Teamwork Management
If keeping everyone on the same page is the key to effective teamwork management, then you can count on Nifty to help you achieve your goals. With Nifty, your entire team can rally behind your organization’s goals by seeing a transparent roadmap of their short and long-term tasks to ensure you have buy-in from employees into your company’s vision.
There are no risks involved — we won’t ask for your credit card during the 14-day free trial. On top of that, our starter pack for small teams comes for free, forever. If you opt for our premium plans, you’ll have the complete flexibility to upgrade or downgrade at any time, depending on your team’s structure and needs.
With features that correspond with each of these effective teamwork models, Nifty can help your team become the best version of itself! Try Nifty for free today! 🚀
