Build and manage effective teams

Working in teams and encouraging effective teamwork among your staff can bring many benefits and competitive advantages to your business.

Business benefits of teamwork

Advantages of effective teamwork in the workplace include:

Increased productivity

Individuals contributing to help a team produce results will feel valued, supported, and committed to each other. This can lead to happier, productive, and more motivated staff.

Deadlines met

Individuals working on their own can only achieve so much in a certain amount of time. Bringing individuals together to work in teams can increase productivity, make heavy workloads more manageable, and help meet tight deadlines sooner.

Problem solving

Teams bring together different people with different ways of thinking, varying levels of experience, and different ideas of how to do things. Several people coming together to consider a problem can often be more effective at finding solutions than one person working alone.

New ideas and opportunities

Teamwork can spark creativity among your staff, which can lead to the development of innovative new ideas, products, or services, as well as identifying new business opportunities.

Support network

In the face of business challenges, people in a team can support one another by helping each other out, especially if an individual in the group is facing difficulties.

Strong relationships

Teamwork helps build strong bonds between colleagues. Team members learn about each other, developing a better understanding of individual strengths, weaknesses, and personal traits. Through stronger relationships, trust is built and communication becomes more natural, open, and free.

Flexibility

Working in teams can help transfer skills and knowledge between individuals. This can lead to more flexibility as individuals will be able to cover for other team members.

Conflict resolution skills

There is often the potential for personality clashes between individual team members, but collaborating towards shared goals often enables employees to work out how best to resolve disagreements for the benefit of the team.

Boost morale

Teamwork can help increase staff morale as individuals will have a sense of belonging to the team and appreciation from others for the qualities they bring to the group.

To get the most from teamwork for your business, see steps to building an effective team in the workplace.

Building and managing a team requires careful consideration and planning. It is not a one-off exercise, team building is a task that needs to be invested in for the long term.

Things to avoid when building teams

There are many reasons why teamwork fails. Examples include teams that:

• lose focus on their purpose or goals
• have individuals who are too similar in terms of skills and ways of thinking will not be able to reach their full potential
• are made up of individuals who are uncompromising, confrontational, and don't look to resolve disputes or find ways of working together with others
• are dominated by one or two individuals
• have individuals who won't take responsibility for their tasks, leading to resentment and blame among team members
• have individuals who don't share information
• don't communicate effectively
• don't look for a consensus when making decisions
• lack openness and trust
• aren't provided with the resources they need to get the job done
• aren't fully supported by management

Find out the steps to building an effective team in the workplace.

Building a strong team doesn't happen automatically. It takes planning and management. There are many factors that you should consider to help you build a team that can reach its full potential and benefit your business.

Recruitment

It can be easy to fall into the trap of recruiting like-minded individuals. Develop an interview process that identifies individuals who are comfortable working in teams, in addition to those with varied skill sets. See recruiting staff and recruitment forms and templates.

Diversity of teams

Teamwork is most effective whenever you promote a diverse mix of individuals with varying levels of skills, experience, and different ways of approaching things. This can give your business a competitive advantage. See prevent discrimination and value diversity.

Build strong relationships

The relationships team members establish among themselves can be integral to the success of the team. Bring your staff together through informal team-building activities that can help individuals learn about each other, break down barriers, and establish trust. These steps can lay the foundations for effective teamwork whenever your staff collaborate to meet business goals.

Define team goals

Ensure that your team has a purpose and clearly define what you want your team to achieve to give them focus. It will help team members to pull together toward shared goals. Establish clear time frames and ensure team members are aware of their responsibilities.

Managing your teams

To get the most out of teams, leaders need to be skilled in management and know how to respond if a conflict arises. They should aim to resolve disputes at an early stage and before tensions escalate. Also, trusting employees and involving them in decisions helps to strengthen the relationship between the manager and individual team members. See team management tips.

Culture and teams

Create a business culture that encourages and rewards teamwork. Give equal importance to meeting collaborative targets and individual targets. The more your business operates with team-based approaches, the more natural this practice will be to your staff.

Training

Enable your staff to access training that focuses on developing skills that are essential to effective teamwork, such as communication and relationship management skills. By building teamworking exercises into other areas of staff training, this can help hone these skills even further. See staff training.

See Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) guidance on managerial behaviours that support health, wellbeing and engagement in the workplace.

Once you have built your team, you must carefully manage it to ensure it continues to operate effectively and delivers the business goals you have set.

Team management tips

If you want to ensure that your staff work well together, here are some tips on how to lead and manage a successful team.

Business goals

Clearly outline the goals you expect the team to achieve and help your team maintain focus on their goals at all times to make sure they stay on track and avoid any temptations to divert from their objective. Having a unified focus and purpose will inspire them to work effectively together.

Encourage input from all

Be inclusive and look at ways to encourage all individuals in the team to contribute. Ensure that a limited number of individuals do not dominate team discussions.

Communicate

Make it easy for team members to communicate with one another by encouraging regular meetings with set agendas to focus discussions. Give staff access to the technology that they need to help them communicate effectively, eg, work phones, laptops, virtual meeting platforms and other electronic devices or software.

Support information sharing

Encourage team members to share information that will contribute to the achievement of team goals. Make it easy for them to collaborate by utilising technologies that enable everyone to access documents if required.

Share the workload

Ensure that the workload is shared evenly across team members.

Monitor performance

Monitor the performance of your team and look for ways to continuously improve. This way, team members know they will grow and develop in their roles by taking a closer look at what they do and how they do it.

Maintain positive relationships

Look at ways to build and maintain strong relationships among your team members. This will lead to increased trust, cooperation and a willingness to help each other out.

Resolve disputes early

Address any disputes between team members early on. Look for chances to mediate and resolve minor disputes by highlighting the team's higher goals.

Seek consensus

While it often takes longer to establish group consensus, this approach can lead to improved decision-making and productivity because it secures every employee's commitment to all phases of the work.

Reward team efforts

Give thanks for a job well done and reward your team for their efforts. Reward the same behaviours every time they appear, discourage poor repeat behaviours when they occur and treat every member of your team with the same fairness and consistency.

Set an example

As an employer or manager, you should display the behaviours you expect from individuals in your team. If you aren't a team player, how can you expect your staff to be?

See the advantages of effective teamwork for business and build an effective workplace team.