Research

• 37% of workers see employee teamwork as very important.
• 33% higher loyalty levels in employees due to good collaboration.
• Managers are responsible for 70% of the change in team engagement.
• 3 out of 4 employers consider teamwork 'very important'.

Statement

Enhancers of within team

• Knowing your strengths and the strengths of your team
• Clarity of your role within the team
• Trust and psychological safety
• Clear team norms and an understood and agreed ‘way’ of doing things

Detractors of within team

• Managers who lack the leadership to motivate employees
• Lack of boundaries around time outside of work
• Lack of recognition
• Lack of role clarity
• Limited scope to use individual strengths

Individual

• Contribute to your team - share ideas, brainstorm, ask for feedback.
• Recognise that a strength of having a team is that all team members won’t come at things the same way - so be open to discussion and to being contradicted.
• Reach out to your peers for help and advice. Let them know your skillset and offer to collaborate.
• Take part in peer to peer feedback. Encourage your teammates to help each other out by inviting feedback and suggestions from each other. Chances are, the boss doesn’t know or understand exactly what everyone on the team does on a day-to-day basis - so team members often appreciate feedback from their peers who understand their work in-depth, and it helps them develop closer relationships and collaborate better in the future.

Leaders

• Include time on meeting agendas to check in with how people are feeling, offering space for stories or narratives
• If possible, maximise team opportunities for discussion. Try to minimise reliance on looking at laptops during meetings.
• Mediate disputes. Some companies approach conflict resolution with a wait-and-see approach, but that doesn’t work very well for team members’ disputes. Because these disputes can quickly grow into serious issues that interfere with projects, team members must address them proactively and may need your help.
• Ensure communication is a two-way street. Teamwork only works when team members feel like they can speak openly, share ideas without getting shot down (and build on those of others), make suggestions, and voice their opinions. Make sure communication isn’t just flowing downward but also upward and between team members.
• Regular round table discussions or pulse-checks on action items can be helpful to check on the progress and implementation of projects.

Organisation

• Identify communication problems. Doing an internal comms assessment may seem strange to bolster teamwork but remember that effective collaboration can’t happen without effective communication. Addressing communications pain points and sources of strife (e.g., failure to meet deadlines, unresponsiveness, and interpersonal issues) in your organisation proactively will make it easier for all of your employees to collaborate in the future.
• Conduct worker opinion or engagement surveys, and share key findings, including workers in action planning
• Authentic information is powerful, so if you want to know where your workforce is when it comes to teamwork, why not just ask them?
• Leadership is a crucial driver of teamwork. Involve leaders in corporate communication - particularly regarding teaming strategies. They will often know how best to get a message across to their people.

• Build self-awareness around your own strengths. When predicting engagement and performance, a team's awareness of their strengths is more important than their specific composition. In other words, just knowing your strengths and your partners’ strengths leads to higher engagement and performance.
• Notice and acknowledge the strengths of your teammates. Focusing on the weaknesses of your team members can seriously affect engagement and consequently lower the team’s productivity. According to Gallup research, employees who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged in their jobs.
• Begin establishing partnerships where you see someone else's strengths complementing yours. Find the partners who love doing things you dread - the ones who think differently from you and approach projects, relationships, and conversations with an alternative perspective.

• Celebrating your success as a team will bring people closer together, encourage conversation, and boost happiness.
• Ask team members for feedback. Soliciting feedback doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. You can create an anonymous poll or do short interviews with team members to see how projects are coming along. Just be sure you’re committed to taking feedback seriously.

• Give leaders the skills to build teams that move beyond roles and into strengths, with the maturity to organise themselves more fluidly around the work to be done.
• As teams begin to stabilise, it’s time to encourage and adopt an organic leadership model that prioritises connectivity and team empowerment over control and centralised decision-making.
• Include team behaviours in your organisational values descriptions.
• Assist your leadership to build inclusive teams. Upskill/Enable leaders to actively support others and model positive and respectful relationships.

• Clarify your purpose within the team. If you don’t understand the meaning of your work within the group, your attention and enthusiasm can dwindle. Be clear about why you’re doing what you’re doing - it’s the key to motivation.
• Clarify ownership early. Teamwork is challenging when people aren’t sure what their roles are. Ambiguity can lead to resentment, arguments, or even delayed projects. So, document the scope of your role (and that of others in your team) from the get-go.
• Make sure that your information and documentation is accessible to everyone, so it is readily available when questions arise.

• Look for opportunities to build team-based projects.
• Look for opportunities to host collaborative meetings that promote sharing ideas or working together on a business challenge or opportunity.
• For teams to work effectively, objectives need to be clearly defined. Competing projects and responsibilities pull most team members in different directions. It’s up to leaders to set the bigger picture so they can set priorities.
• Adapt, improve and grow. As expectations evolve, so will the demands on leadership. Define how you measure outcomes, success and culture, and develop quick mechanisms to adapt and improve.
• Think about aligning how performance is measured with new leadership models by rewarding teams rather than individuals, measuring outcomes rather than outputs and designing fast, higher quality feedback loops.

• Have an organisational purpose. Every team member should be clear on the company’s long-term goals. This ensures the team projects are purpose-driven and valuable, have clearly defined and measurable objectives, and that everyone on the team moves in the same direction.

• Ask to establish team rules. Rules are everywhere - on the sports field, in daily interactions - and they exist to keep everyone safe and on the same page. How can we move forward if we don’t know where we stand? Rules will safeguard the success and productivity of a team.

• Establish team rules to keep everyone aligned.
• It starts at the top. If you don’t already have good teamwork at senior levels, then it’s time for the leadership team to lead by example. You and they are the ones that the rest of your company look to for guidance, so they should be establishing teamwork as the norm.

• Think about teams when hiring. When you know that a new hire will be working as a part of a team, consider involving that team in the hiring process.
• While it can be tempting to fill positions with candidates with superior qualifications, consider the existing strengths on teams and look for a complementary fit.
• Set up suitable practices to review team strengths and personality composition and analyse team habits and practices.