Looking for ideas to help your team work together and collaborate? To take a group of team and make them a team takes time, effort, and patience. Here are some ideas to help them get started:
Office Skills Fair
This can take various shapes, but the idea itself is simple. Get everyone to make a little poster of themselves, promoting their skills and themselves. This can be done on an individual basis, or a team or department (depending on the size of the department). The main idea is for everyone to get a wider understanding of each other’s skills, interests, and promote ways of working together.
Change Your Meetings to Give People Space and Time to Collaborate
Meetings, with someone driving it, and someone taking the minutes, can become one-sided affairs, with one person doing most of the talking and everyone else doing something, or wishing they were doing something else.
There are better ways to have meetings. In fact there are many better ways. If you’re physically co-located, setup a whiteboard, give everyone sharpies and sticky notes, and lead them through a brainstorming session. Then, help them to categorise and organise the ideas, vote on them, assign tasks to everyone, and later document the outcomes. Or, use an online tool and do the same. Everyone will feel heard, engaged and valued.
Team Building
Building familiarity, trust and recognition in the team can also help. There are many ideas online for team building activities, from the standard ‘two truths and a lie’, to all day activities where team members must collaborate to solve tasks. Other alternatives are profiling tools such as Clifton Strengths or the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, which despite their limitations can help everyone understand each other, in terms of their strengths, how they handle different situations, or how they like to learn and communicate. My article on building a team from the ground up has some great tips.
Building Communication
It’s hard to have teamwork and collaboration if communication in the workplace is a problem. It could be a trust issue, it could also be that not enough work has been put into trying to build a team. Identify the source of the issue and work from there.
Some things to consider are communication preferences, for example some people prefer a chat tool like Slack, or email, phone, or face-to-face. Some people have times when they like to talk, and other times when they prefer to be able top focus on their individual contribution. The important step is to have a conversation with the team about it.
You can also do some activities from improvisational theatre that can be fun. One simple activity is for everyone to contribute one line to a silly story. This short act of group silliness helps get everyone outside of their usual role and forces them listen to the other team members as they contribute. From my experience it can seem very awkward at first, and that is actually the point.
Rewarding Teams
Rewarding individual effort is good, but recognising and rewarding teams can encourage the team members to work together to achieve. Traditional reward systems in most organisations seem to be focussed on the efforts of individuals, which can setup rivalries and competition, and force self-promotion in the workplace. If you reward team effort, some of this will disappear, and team members more motivate to work together to achieve goals.
Establish Clear Team Goals
A team needs a common goal to achieve so they collaborate and share, and work together. Set a clear goal for them, help them understand the goal, and then draw on their skills and experience to achieve it. Give the team members a say in the decisions. Guide and coaching them when they need help, and give them space and the confidence to make their own decisions. This will encourage them to contribute and will help to promote ownership in their work.
Photo by Clayton Cardinalli on Unsplash
